Hero looks like an unassuming and slightly over-sized coffee maker and, to be honest, if your poured some espresso into it, it might just spit some out into its plastic dispenser cup. But that’s not why Hero may become your healthcare hero.

The roughly 10-pound home appliance is actually a smart, automated prescription and vitamin dispenser that can help clear your cabinet of tiny, orange plastic bottles and oversized vitamin containers. It can know as much about your family’s medicine needs as the head of the household and potentially do a more efficient job of dispensing pills on a timely basis, with all the necessary safety checks and balances in place.

Unveiled this week at South by Southwest Interactive in Austin, Texas, by the Brooklyn-based health tech startup Hero, the Hero smart appliance enters a market full of prescription drug consumers. According to a 2013 Mayo Clinic report, roughly 70% of all Americans take at least one prescription medicine (at least 50% take two). In my house, the family takes at least four. We also have a daily vitamin regimen. It’s a lot of bottles to juggle and pills to manage.

It can be hard for anyone to keep track of what they have and haven’t taken. Some people employ “Day of the Week” pill cases. Others use dead reckoning, but not always successfully. In 2009, the National Institute of Drug Abuse reported 4.6 million drug-related emergency room visits; roughly half of them were related to pharmaceuticals.

With Hero, the developers believe they’ve come up with a smarter and more secure way of dispensing drugs, vitamins and even aspirin for one-off headache medicine requests. Hero is designed to manage them all.

Drug test

Hero plugs into a standard wall outlet. There is a companion app, but you don’t need to use that for initial set-up or drug dispensing. The face of the counter-top device has a small color LCD screen and below it a circular push button panel. For now, you have to enter all information through this panel, which forces you to navigate to each letter and then press enter. In my demonstration, we entered my first name and then moved on to entering the name of my demo vitamins. It’s critical that you tie together users with their prescriptions and vitamins and the schedule of consumption for each. Hero guides you through each step.

Hero is pretty easy to use, though it could do with the introduction of a touch screen. This circular button interface can be a pain to use when you have to enter drug names. Image: Mashable, Tyler Essary

After I entered my name, I navigated to entering the name of my vitamin, in this case Fish Oil. In this version of Hero, there’s no drug and vitamin database. Each medicine and supplement has to be ploddingly spelled out. At least you only have to do this once per user. The interface then guides you to a dosage and intake schedule.

Next comes the fun part.

Once Hero has your name, drugs you take and the schedule, you get to put your prescription pills or vitamins inside the device. A front door pops open to reveal a carousel of 10 small plastic containers (that’s the total number of different pills it can hold at any one time). I just had to remove one, pour in the pills, replace it and close the door.

You load your pills in the carousel-style holder. Image: Mashable, Tyler Essary

Right below the door is a plastic dispenser cup. When it’s time for your prescriptions and vitamins, Hero will alert you (it can also do so through the app), but it won’t drop any pills into the cup until you hit the enter button, telling it to dispense. It’s a smart safety feature, since no one wants their pills just lying in a cup, waiting for someone else to take them

I hit the button, Hero rather loudly dispensed my fish oil gel cap into the cup and then I grabbed the cup and emptied out the pill out into my palm. Hero knows, by the way, when the cup is there and when you put it back.

Watch your meds

There are other safeguards in the HIPPA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act)-compliant system, like an app notification if there has been a power outage, which could affect Hero. Similarly, there’s a special key you can use to open the dispenser if power goes out. The home healthcare-giver would, obviously, be the one who holds onto that plastic key.

Hero's small screen offers concise messages Image: Mashable, Tyler Essary

While Hero keeps track of and dispenses medicine. The app is designed to keep track of your vitamin and prescription intake for each family member over time. It can also let you know if your prescriptions are running low.

Hero’s app will also connect users to a private community where you can find people who take similar medications and may have similar health issues. It can also provide bits of data-driven trivia, like why more people in congested cities take Fish Oil (because they do not get enough sunlight).

I can see some limitations in the product. Ten containers would not cover the vitamin and prescription needs of my family of four. Hero would be useless when I’m on the road, though the app could remind me to take my pills (which would be in some portable container and not back at home in Hero). The Hero team told me that they are working some sort of portable companion device.

Hero should start shipping sometime this summer and will list for $399.