Low-Cost, Disposable, Flexible, and Smartphone Enabled Pressure Sensor for Monitoring Drug Dosage in Smart Medicine Applications

Due to the rising cases of a prescribed drug overdose and mishandling of the medication container there is an urgent need to devise a smart technological solution to assist this issue. One of the possible solutions to the above issue is the use of low-cost pressure sensor integrated with the medicine container whose data can be communicated to the dedicated smartphone Android application. Once the patient taps the medicine out, the pressure sensor sends the data to the smartphone which can be monitored by the patient's family and the sensor can then be discarded. In this work, a simple all paper based pressure sensor to monitor drug dosage is fabricated using Molybdenum disulfide (MoS2) grown on paper with an interdigitated electrode drawn using graphite pencil on paper as electrodes. The sensitivity of the fabricated pressure sensor was found to be 0.32 kPa(-1) which is comparable and even better than the pressure sensor fabricated using sophisticated techniques. Repeatability of the sensor over 2000 cycles indicates an excellent long-term stability. Bending cycle studies over 1000 cycles observes a negligible change in the performance suggesting the high reliability of the sensor. The fabricated pressure sensor was integrated successfully in the medicine package to monitor the real time pills intake by a patient which shows high promise for its use in health care industry. The successful demonstration of the smart drug dosage system is a step ahead in health care industry which opens up many avenues of research in the similar field.