A new home robot is in the works, and it wants to help you better manage your health.
Meet Pillo, an intelligent home health companion robot that can manage your medications, answer your medical questions, re-order medications, send notifications to family members when medications are missed, and connect you directly with doctors.
We’re waiting to hear back from Pillo Health for additional information, so details at the moment are somewhat fuzzy. But Pillo is being billed as “not your ordinary pillbox,” so it sounds like Pillo will dispense your pills accordingly each day into the glass in the cup holder. Pillo also claims to have user recognition, which could mean Pillo supports multiple user profiles and properly dispenses medication to each user.
Pillo also said it has omnidirectional speakers and microphones that can pick up sound from all directions, which points to some sort of voice interaction. Pillo’s Jibo-esque design also is very sleek and easy on the eyes.
Pillo also claims to offer telemedicine capabilities, which would explain what its “large HD screen” is for. Here’s a tweet from Pillo Health on May 31, 2016 that mentions the telemedicine capability:
No word on pricing or availability either, but Pillo Health said it will be launching an Indiegogo campaign in June 2016.
There are many automated pill dispensers on the market, with the Hero pill-dispensing robot introduced at South by Southwest Interactive being one of the newest. As Mashable points out, “[Hero] can know as much about your family’s medicine needs as the head of the household and potentially do a more efficient job of dispensing pills on a timely basis, with all the necessary safety checks and balances in place.”
Most personal robots, including Amazon Echo, Alpha 2 and Jibo, can remind you to take medications, too. But they can’t actually dispense them like it appears Pillo can.
Catalia Health’s Mabu is somewhat of a Pillo competitor, too. Mabu is an interactive robot that listens and talks, acting as a healthcare coach to aid in chronic disease management and as a means of staying in touch with doctor’s offices and pharmacies. The difference here is that Mabu’s customers are healthcare companies, including pharmaceutical manufacturers and distributors, home health agencies, and healthcare providers, while Pillo seems to be targeting consumers.
We’ll update this story as more details about Pillo become available, but it already appears as though the home health robot is facing an uphill battle.