Las Vegas startup PillDrill honored by Consumer Technology Association

The Consumer Technology Association, responsible for the CES international consumer electronics show, honored a Las Vegas-based startup Thursday.

PillDrill Inc. was one of roughly 300 companies named a CES 2017 Innovation Awards Honoree, and one of at least 16 honorees in the Tech for A Better World category.

Peter Havas, CEO and co-founder of PillDrill, created a smart medication tracking system.

“My parents (who live in Australia) are in their 80s and I keep track of their pills from here,” Havas said while pointing to the phone in his pocket. “I have my parents set up such that if they don’t take their medication by a certain time then I get a notification.”

The PillDrill system looks like an alarm clock. It comes with two weekly pill strips that have removable radio frequency identification (RFID) pods, as well as lettered RFID tags that can be placed on personal prescription bottles. The device that looks like an alarm clock is also equipied with RFID technology, allowing the pods and tags to be read by the device by scanning them. PillDrill also comes with a “mood cube” and an accompanying smartphone app.

Havas said he and his team of four sought to design PillDrill to look “not obviously medical” and to not interrupt a user’s normal pill-taking habit.

“My father’s gift to me is high cholesterol,” Havas joked, noting that he personally finds the device to be non-intrusive with his own cocktail of pills.

“Let’s say it’s 10 at night, (the device) is telling me to take my Lipitor. On the screen it will say ‘A Lipitor’ (and make an audible reminder sound). This is my Lipitor in a bottle with one of the PillDrill scanning tags (labeled ‘A’) on top, so I do what I normally do when I take a pill.”

As he puts the bottle back down he waves it across the face of the device that looks like an alarm clock and it flashes a light and beeps, acknowledging that he took the correct pill. Moments later, his phone buzzes, notifying him that he took his pill, and notifying his parents in Sydney.

Along with keeping track of his medication schedule, the device can also keep track of how he is feeling on the medication by scanning the mood cube, a cube the size of a clementine with different smiley face icons on its sides. He said a more symptom-oriented cube is under development, along with a user-friendly way of tracking symptoms and medication information.

“The idea was to keep it really, really, really simple.”

Havas created the PillDrill device to address the “medication adherence” problem in a way that takes the embarrassment or shame out of taking medication, he said.

In interviewing pill takers while developing the product, Havas said he found that their pill device or medication reminder device would sometimes be “as big as a coffee machine.”

“At that point you may as well have a neon sign saying ‘I take a lot of pills,’” he joked. “But what we found was that they would hide that device behind a plant, for example, when guests would come over and then forget to put it back. So, it would still be hiding behind that plant 30 days later.”

For some, though, forgetting to take a medication can have serious, and even deadly, consequences.

According to the American College of Preventative Medicine, “nonadherence” causes roughly 125,000 deaths per year. That comes with an associated cost of between $100 billion and $300 billion in U.S. healthcare costs, according to the IMS Institute for Healthcare Informatics.

Havas said he is “a little punch drunk” by the initial success of his product and the CES award. PillDrill will be available for $199 at CVS online by January, he said.

Contact Nicole Raz at nraz@reviewjournal.com or 702-380-4512. Follow @JournalistNikki on Twitter.