„Telecare“ is a concept and prototyping project for the healthcare company Mednovo. The goal is it to create and develop innovative ideas to support seniors and somehow disabled persons. That means, that different supportive modules will be active inside the living area, which will be controlled by a single computer. The data of these applications is stored in a database and can be controlled by nursing staff by an administration software.

It exists a software basis, which can be accomodated to the personnel needs of every individual costumer. The currently working applications are a calender with appiontment-reminder, an alarm clock, a digital shoppinglist and an “Away-Mode”.

An Application that has to be developed is an automatic pillbox. The concept for this pillbox is, that the costumer is informed by an acoustic signal when it’s time to take his or her medicine. The application also distributes the pills to the costumer and informs the nursing staff when something is wrong with the supply of medicine. A team of design and mechanics students created a functional concept for the pillbox. Now, a software engineering team is developing the software system.

The administration software for the nursing staff includes information about the costumer and a contact person. The nursing staff is informed by the administration software of events such as wrong supply of the pillbox. In later versions, the nursing staff will be able to access several applications to, for instance enter appointments into the costumers calendar.

The GUI (the costumer access to the software) is provided in form of a touchscreen and the whole project is developed in C#.NET.