In Canada and the United States, 15 million women rely on oral contraceptives to prevent pregnancy — yet one in 10 of these women will become pregnant during their first year on the Pill, mostly because they take it irregularly or forget to take it completely. These statistics demonstrated a need for University of Toronto MASc students Eric Ma and Tony Zhang, and PhD candidate Valentin Peretroukhin, to come up with the idea for
Pillsy, a smart pouch to help women consistently take their birth control pills.
The pouch, which is outfitted with sensors, stores the pills and detects if the user has actually taken the pill. The pouch then communicates this to the user’s smartphone via BA luetooth, and doesn’t require any manual input.
Currently, the project is undergoing beta testing, while the student group behind the project will move on to a Kickstarter campaign in 2016.
“We chose Kickstarter as it will provide further market validation as well as increased funding,” says Courtney Smith, a student working on the Pillsy project and an MPH candidate at the Dalla Lana School of Public Health. “Kickstarter is known to be popular among our target demographic of young women and their partners, so this will serve as a cost-effective mechanism for organic advertising.”
While the pouch is being marketed to women who use birth control, eventually the group will expand to other pill markets. “It is definitely our plan to expand to other time-sensitive medications in the future like heart disease medications, especially as new generations of older adults become more and more tech savvy,” says Smith.