MEDICATION CLOCK

摘要

A medication clock (10) is disclosed including a plurality of compartment (14) with each compartment being separately usable for holding one or more medications to be dispensed, the medication being chosen from prescription medications which have individual dosages to be taken at specific times, prescription medications to be taken under the control of the patient on an as needed basis and nonprescription medications to be taken under the control of the patient, a programmable timer which produces a medication dispensing signal indicating the times during a day that a patient is to take one more medications; an alarm (50) responsive to the medication dispensing cycle produced by the programmable timer for alerting the patient that it is time to take a particular medication, the alarm including a tone generator and a separate visual display indicator (32) located in proximity to each of the compartments, the tone generator producing an audible tone in response to the medication dispensing signal and the visual display indicator in proximity to the compartment (14) associated with the medication to be taken producing a visual indication in response to the medication dispensing signal; patient acknowledgement devices located in proximity to each of the compartments which are separately activatable by the patient to produce a patient acknowledgement signal that, one of the medications stored in the compartment in proximity to the devices for producing the patient acknowledgement signal which produced a patient acknowledgement signal has been taken including any medication in the compartment in proximity to the visual display indicator which has produced a visual indication, has been taken; a memory coupled to the programmable timer and to each device for producing a patient acknowledgement signal and having a plurality of separate storage locations with each storage location being associated with one of the devices and its associated compartment, each separate storage location being used for storing the time and date of each patient acknowledgement signal for indicating the time and date of taking each dosage of a particular medication; and an output coupled to the memory for providing an identification of the medication, time and date of each dosage of medication taken by the patient which is stored in memory for each of the medications being taken by the patient.