Improving the Concept of Medication Vending Machine
in the Light of COVID-19 and other Pandemics
1,2,3,4
Student, Department of Electronics Engineering, Matoshri College of Engineering & Research Centre, Nashik, INDIA
5
Professor, Department of Electronics Engineering, Matoshri College of Engineering & Research Centre, Nashik, INDIA
Abstract- Pandemics are usually followed by
many infected people, enormous number of
critical patients and unavoidable fatal outcomes.
If the disease is transmitted by contact, one of the
most important measures for preventing the
spread of the disease is social distancing. Ensuring
social distancing is one of the most difficult tasks
of the governments of countries during the
pandemic. It has been shown in practice that any
measure or way to increase social distance
significantly reduces the number of victims and
shortens the duration of the pandemic. This
system proposes a modification of the existing
concept of a vending machine for distributing
drugs (medication vending machines – MVM),
which would enable better social distancing in the
case of pandemics/epidemics, such as the current
COVID-19 pandemic. The proposed modification
is adapted to the healthcare system organization
that exists in the European countries and can be
implemented in similar health care systems, such
as in the neighboring countries.
Keywords: Medication vending machine, COVID-
19, Pandemic, Social distancing, Smart city.
I. INTRODUCTION
Vending machines are widely used in many
domains around the world, such as a vending
machine for food, drinks, cigarettes,
newspapers, etc. They started a long time ago.
The first vending machine was the coin-operated
machine for holy water dispensing constructed
in 17th century by Hero of Alexandria, Greek
mathematician, and engineer from Alexandria.
The first modern coin-operated vending
machines were introduced in London, England
in the early 1880s, dispensing postcards. The
machine was invented by Percival Everitt in
1883 and soon became a widespread feature at
railway stations and post offices, dispensing
envelopes, postcards, and notepaper. The
Sweetmeat Automatic Delivery Company was
founded in 1887 in England as the first company
to deal primarily with the installation and
maintenance of vending machines. In 1893,
Stollwerck, a German chocolate manufacturer,
was selling its chocolate in 15,000 vending
machines. It set up separate companies in
various territories to manufacture vending
machines to sell not just chocolate, but
cigarettes, matches, chewing gum and soap
products [2].
A very interesting real-life story in COVID-
19 times comes from Vancouver [6]. The opioid
epidemic, which caused the declaration of public
health emergency in Vancouver four years ago,
is made worse by the COVID-19 pandemic. It is
a crisis on top of a crisis. The usual harm-
reduction approach, a designated location where
drugs can be taken with oversight by first aid-
trained staff, is problematic. Such sites
constitute a public gathering place and have
been closed to avoid public gatherings. The
illegal drug supply is getting more expensive
and less predictable. Overdose deaths still
happen often. MySafe, Dispension Industries’
opioid-dispensing ATM, debuted in Vancouver
in December 2019 as part of Tyndall’s plan to
replace risky street drugs with safe,
pharmaceutical-grade opioids and reduce the
staggering rate of overdoses. About a dozen
patients use the machine. All report an improved
quality of life and less involvement in the
dangerous street activities that used to pay for
their habit.
Previously described cases showed that MVM
can have a very good perspective and there are a
set of reasons to use them. But it is the fact that
today’s potential of MVM is not well exploited.
There are several reasons. Some of them will be
discussed in the next chapter. It is quite clear
that for the expansion of MVM use some
concepts of MVM should be changed and
adapted to a concrete scenario of use. One
modification we proposed in this paper inspired
by the actual COVID-19 pandemic and effort of
all countries to reduce virus SARS-CoV-2 [7]
expansion by providing better social distancing
as one of the most efficient activities in the
suppression of the spread of an epidemic.
II. LITERATURE REVIEW
Ratna Mayasari; Renaldi Permana Putra; [10]
present a system that tested and evaluated the
IoT connectivity using LoRaWAN for a vending
machine network. The tested connectivity range
are 0, 200, 400, and 600 meters and we did not
take varying condition of any varying weather
condition. The performance of Time on-air,
Received Signal Strength Indicator (RSSI),
Packet Delivery Ratio (PDR), and Throughput
are 1.84 seconds, 87%, -87.75 dBm, and 374.59
bit/s, respectively.
A very interesting real-life story in COVID-19
times comes from Vancouver [6]. The opioid
epidemic, which caused the declaration of public
health emergency in Vancouver four years ago,
is made worse by the COVID-19 pandemic. It is
a crisis on top of a crisis. The usual harm-
reduction approach, a designated location where
drugs can be taken with oversight by first aid-
trained staff, is problematic. Such sites
constitute a public gathering place and have
been closed in order to avoid public gatherings.
The illegal drug supply is getting more
expensive and less predictable. Overdose deaths
still happen often. MySafe, Dispension
Industries’ opioid-dispensing ATM, debuted in
Vancouver in December 2019 as part of
Tyndall’s plan to replace risky street drugs with
safe, pharmaceutical-grade opioids and reduce
the staggering rate of overdoses. About a dozen
patients use the machine. All report an improved
quality of life and less involvement in the
dangerous street activities that used to pay for
their habit.
Previously described cases showed that MVM
can have a very good perspective and there are a
set of reasons to use them. But it is the fact that
today’s potential of MVM is not well exploited.
There are several reasons. Some of them will be
discussed in the next chapter. It is quite clear
that for the expansion of MVM use some
concepts of MVM should be changed and
adapted to a concrete scenario of use.
One modification we proposed in this paper
inspired by the actual COVID-19 pandemic and
effort of all countries to reduce virus SARS-
CoV-2 [7] expansion by providing better social
distancing as one of the most efficient activities
in the suppression of the spread of an epidemic.
There are many obstacles and open-ended issues
that have prevented the mass use of medication
vending machines. Some of them are universal
while some are specific to some country or
region, for example different law regulations.
We will number some of them. It is the fact that
the number of medications is huge and that it is
not possible to make it available through the
vending machines. So, medication vending
machines can be used for a restricted number of
medications. In many cases patients ask a
pharmacist for some explanation therefore, a
simple MVM cannot cover these cases and
patients should request assistance directly at the
pharmacy, where the staff is available, instead of
using MVM. There are different models of
paying for medications. It differs from country
to country. For example, in the Republic of
Serbia for a huge number of medications
patients should pay only part of price or nothing,
while for others they should pay full price.
Therefore, MVM should support different
pricing/paying models. For most medications,
patients must have an adequate prescription. So,
MVM should be able to “read” prescriptions and
verify a patient’s request. Of course, there are
other practical open questions: where to install
MVM (near a pharmacy or not), the capacity of
MVM, security (especially if there are
narcotics), how and when to add new
medications in a machine, etc.
III. PROPOSED ARCHITECTURE
Figure 1 System Architecture
This system proposes a modification of the
existing concept of a vending machine for
distributing drugs (medication vending machines
– MVM), which would enable better social
distancing in the case of pandemics/epidemics,
such as the current COVID-19 pandemic. The
proposed modification is adapted to the
healthcare system organization that exists in the
European countries and can be implemented in
similar health care systems, such as in the
neighboring countries.
In proposed aquaponics there are 2 modules
namely 1) coin-acceptor, microcontroller, and
dispenser motor 2) cloud and application. The
first module has three functions out of which the
first one includes accept coin from user, verify
amount and dispense the product i.e., sanitizer
dispenser, face mask. The second module use for
connectivity, cloud storage, and mobile
application for remote monitoring and
controlling.
In the proposed system, various services of
Amazon AWS are utilized like Simple Storage
service to store application data, datasets,
Amazon DynamoDB is used as a database to
store data, Amazon Elastic beanstalk to deploy
python application. Mobile application for end
user developed using Flutter framework and
Dart programming language. Flutter is the latest
framework developed by Google for building
attractive, natively compiled mobile and web
applications from a single codebase.
IV. CONCLUSION
It is important to consider how this technology
may affect quality of medication delivery and
use in the convid-19 pandemic to avoid the
spread of novel corona virus. With quality as a
major focus of the new wave of health care, how
will medication be vending machines fare? If
such mechanisms are inevitable, how will
pharmacists complement this service? Will
virtual pharmacist patient consultations be the
new norm? Will such technology improve or
worsen the existing patient-pharmacist
relationship? How will the technology affect
older adults who may be at increased risk for
adverse effects from medications? Many such
questions remain unanswered. Nonetheless, as
pharmacists looking to our future, we must
consider quality services that hold value to our
patients and other health professionals. As
technology is sure to evolve, pharmacists must
look toward quality improvement in patient care
services and provide due expertise in medication
management, so such technology becomes
integrated as a fundamental way of pharmacy
practice, regardless of setting. In this changing
culture of health care and technology, now is an
opportune time for pharmacists to drive the
expectations of patients and other health
professionals about the value of pharmacist
services within the patient care continuum.
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