Award-winning: FIDS students Henri Fröhlich, Benjamin Knöbel, and Joseph Schuler have won the Hackaburg 2025 with BeyondBlister!
“Older patients, particularly those suffering from dementia, find it difficult to take their daily medication. We automate the process of removing the medication from the blister pack and administering it on time.”
BeyondBlister is a medium-sized device where the user first scans a blister pack containing medication and then inserts it into the device. According to a pre-set schedule, the individual tablets are mechanically ejected from the blister pack and dispensed to the user. If the user inserts a tablet that does not match their medication schedule, nothing is, of course, ejected or dispensed.
To build the BeyondBlister, the team used Fusion 360 to model the entire design, focusing on 3D printing and laser cutting to produce the basic structure. In addition, they used ESPs and various stepper motors to enable the compression and, consequently, the dispensing of the medication. For the programming, they used Arduino IDE to control the entire electronics system and PyTorch in combination with an ESP camera to implement the ‘Depth-Anything’ vision model, which enabled them to determine where the tablets were located in the blister pack and where they were not.
More about BeyondBlister (external link, opens in a new window)
Henri Fröhlich, B.Sc. Computer Science, 2nd semester, UR
Benjamin Knöbel del Olmo, BSc in Engineering Science, 4th semester, TUM
Joseph Schuler, BSc in Mathematics, 2nd semester, FAU
