Autopharm
Automating pharmacies in India
Automation | Startup | Prototyping
A Startup Initiative
Year: 2018
Collaborators: Akash Pardasani, Dhananjay Pandey, Saif Ali
Funded
INR 200,000
under Students Startup Action Programme
Conducted by: Industrial Research and Development (IRD), IIT Delhi
Background
Advanced technologies have made it easier to automate the repetitive tasks. With Autopharm, our aim was to automate Indian pharmacies.
We interviewed managers, owners, and workers from different pharmacies. Below are the insights from those interviews. It is worth mentioning that most of the workers in Indian pharmacies don't have any formal education in medicines and generally rely on their memory to complete an order.
Training
New workers take approaximately two years to master the way of working in pharmacies
Careless
Most pharmacy stores in India don't have any formalized system to keep track of medicine's expiry dates
Investment
A large chunk of income goes to worker's salary
Errors
Workers sometimes slip wrong or expired medicines by mistake
A journey from failed but fun attempts to the first open display of the prototype
FIN.