Adultproof Cap

"Take your medicine," the doctor says. But as many as half of all patients take that advice too lightly. They often skip doses, ingest them at the wrong intervals or even neglect their pills for days or weeks at a time, drastically reducing the chances that the medication will be effective.

Later this year Aprex, a company based in Fremont, Calif., will begin marketing a high-tech medicine bottle designed to help doctors make sure that patients obey orders. Called MEMS (for medication event monitoring system), the container comes with a tiny computer chip embedded in its cap. When the patient takes off the cap to remove a pill, the chip records the day and time. At the patient's next checkup, the doctor can ask for the bottle back. Then the physician inserts the cap into a special electronic machine that analyzes the data contained in the chip and lets the doctor know how regularly the pills were taken.

The product has already proved valuable in several clinical trials of new drugs. Neurologists using MEMS bottles in a Yale University study of a teatment for epilepsy found that two-thirds of the seizures suffered by the patients occurred at times when they had not taken the proper dosage of the medicine. Dr. John Urquhart, a co-founder of Aprex, thinks MEMS bottles can "save lives and minimize unnecessary hospitalization and diagnostic tests."