A Compact Automated Tablet Dispensing & Packaging System for Community Healthcare Facilities to Provide Unit Dose Repackaging Service

Unit dose packaging is a gradually promoted medicine packaging form, which has been widely proved to improve the convenience, compliance and safety of patients. Especially for the elderly patients with chronic diseases, who need to take a variety of drugs and their cognitive ability is reduced, providing unit dose packaging is a very effective service. At present, the large-scale automatic production mode of unit dose packaging is not suitable for community healthcare facilities, while the manual mode has low safety and high workload. Therefore, on the basis of investigation and analysis, this research designed a compact automated tablet dispensing & packaging system for these facilities, and built a prototype, and tested the performance and availability of the system in the laboratory. In this way, the workload of staff will be reduced, and the level of unit dose drug packaging service provided by these facilities will be improved. In a word, designing the service-oriented products based on a wide range of existing community facilities is an enlightening innovative way for welfare for the elderly.