Smaller Autonomous Mobility Vehicles

Story: My father faced other transportation challenges: often my stepmother didn’t feel up to going to one of the excellent restaurants for the daily meal included in their fees. Another of the services offered at Charlestown was delivery of your food order to your apartment. Unfortunately, this service took up to 30 minutes and hot foods often arrived only warm. An Autonomous Personal Mobility Vehicle could be used to deliver the food. But using a vehicle that could also carry a person seems wasteful, and would crowd the halls with extra vehicles.

So let’s apply the same technology to build smaller Autonomous Vehicles. Each vehicle is sized for the targeted load. Dinner, groceries, books and many other things could be carried in a container about 1 foot on a side. Pizzas need a larger square container but only a couple inches tall. Mail, newspapers, magazines, and documents could be carried in these or a smaller container. A piece of fruit or a vegetable needs an even smaller container, perhaps 6 inches on a side. An individual beverage could be carried in a similar sized container, but needs to be waterproof and sterilizable. Pills and other medications could be carried in an even smaller container.

If you are skeptical that a small Autonomous Vehicle could be constructed with today's technology, consider that more than 14 million Roombas have been sold so far [http://www.irobot.com/About-iRobot/Company-Information/History.aspx accessed 5/4/2016]. An amusing claim is that a Roomba can travel 1,134 km during its lifetime [http://www.dailyinfographic.com/roomba-by-numbers-infographic 5/4/2016]. My Roomba goes farther on a kwatt-hr of energy than my Chevy Volt did, and the Roomba is vacuuming at the same time. My Roomba can also carry a few books, and I suspect you have seen videos of cats and babies riding on Roombas too. So if you take out the vacuuming equipment and reprogram the guidance, the Roomba could carry even more of a load, and go farther faster. It even knows enough to go back to its Dock to recharge itself.

Let’s look at an example of how such a small Autonomous Vehicle might be used, and the impact it might have.

Medication Delivery

Story Continued:  One of the challenges my father faced was the 21 different medications he took. They had a bewildering array of different schedules and restrictions: with food, without food, weekly, at bedtime, with a full glass of water, don’t lie down for a half hour after taking, etc. He used one of the pill cases with four compartments for each of the seven days. But that only addressed the approximate time, not all the other constraints. As he aged, he couldn’t even fill the pill case himself. Another useful service at Charlestown was that a nurse would fill the case for $10. And then he still had to remember to get the pills from the case at the appropriate time and take them.

What if we build an Autonomous Vehicle that delivers exactly the set of medications you take at any one time. We can use your smartphone or other smart devices to schedule the arrival of your medication vehicle, and to remind you to take the medications on schedule and under the proper conditions. The camera in your smart device can check the pills to be sure that they match your prescription for size, color, shape, and markings. The smart device can also watch you actually take the medications, and connect you to someone to help in case of problems.

The medications could be loaded into the Autonomous Vehicle by an automated pill dispenser in your neighborhood, so instead of having 90 days of each medication in your home and in each of your neighbors’ homes, there is a smaller number stored in your neighborhood. Or if you are in your office, or at a restaurant, or traveling, the medications can be delivered there instead. One of the big advantages of automatic pill dispensers is filling prescriptions safely without human intervention – essentially all prescription errors are human errors, and we have the check when they are delivered to you as well. This could dramatically reduce the costs of medications, improve the safety of taking drugs, and reduce drug abuse.

These tiny Autonomous Vehicles can be quite inexpensive, and they are shared among many people. As an example, if the vehicle cost $100, and it is shared among just 10 people, taking medications 4 times a day for one year the cost of the vehicle per delivery is less than one cent.

So we have a system for economically getting you to take the correct medications at the correct time with the correct conditions. Now let’s look at some of the other implications of this system.

One of the banes of public health is getting people to take a full course of medication. For example, taking a partial course of antibiotics can breed a strain of bacteria that are resistant to the antibiotics – a particular problem with tuberculosis. People decide they are feeling better, so they stop the treatment, or they forget, or they sell the remaining medicines. This is one of the factors leading to the current strains of bacteria requiring extreme and even dangerous treatments, or with no known treatment, such as necrotizing fasciitis where removal of the diseased tissue is required.

Another challenge is dispensing drugs in large quantities. Over the counter drugs, notably pain relievers are sold in bottles of hundreds, although there are efforts to limit the bottle size to only tens, still enough for misuse and overdose. For continuously used prescription drugs, the standard practice is sending a 90-day supply – balancing the cost of dispensing and delivering the drugs versus the “investment” in more pills. The incremental cost of a pill to the drug manufacturer is usually minimal, while the cost of the pharmacist, and the drugstore or mail, are increasing. If your prescription changes or you recover from the condition, these practices lead to large quantities of unused drugs sitting in people’s homes. They then get flushed down the toilet, put in the garbage, used long after their expiration date, sold to other people without prescription, or otherwise abused.

Story: I have a friend who had their knee replaced. The standard pain medications caused nausea, confusion, and other serious side effects. In the process of finding a pain reliever that worked moderately well, they wound up with several bottles of different pain medications – a potentially dangerous situation.

In 2014 more than 14,000 people died from overdoses involving prescription opioids. [http://www.cdc.gov/drugoverdose/data/overdose.html accessed 5/4/2016]. Unintentional Injury in the leading cause of death for ages 1-44, and Poisoning is the leading cause of Unintentional Injury, with over 42,000 deaths in 2014. [http://www.cdc.gov/injury/images/lc-charts/leading_causes_of_death_age_group_2014_1050w760h.gif accessed 5/04/2016]. Drug poisoning deaths have even overtaken Motor Vehicle deaths in recent years. [http://www.poison.org/poison-statistics-national accessed 5/5/2016]

Pain medications are the most common substances in adult poison exposures, with other drugs making up the majority of poisoning causes.

So our proposed system of distributing exactly the medications needed at one time, and assuring that the proper person takes the mediations, would help eliminate this burgeoning national disaster. For more details on cost estimates of this approach, see the blog entry: Delivering Medications -- An Example of How Autonomous Vehicles Can Improve Our Lives and our Economy.