SmartMed: A Medication Management System to Improve Adherence

摘要

Adherence is the degree to which patients comply with their caregivers prescribed treatments. Lack of adherence due to various causes negatively affects health objectives. Prior work in the field of medication management has indicated the usefulness of IT as a possible aid for those who have difficulty adhering to prescribed medication regimes. In this paper we present a medication management system (SmartMed) that has been designed to monitor and increase adherence. The SmartMed system consists of a portable pill bottle device, a local base station, and a cloud data service. It reminds users when it is time to take their medications, and acquires adherence data which is accessible for applications that query the data service. The project was undertaken as an undergraduate engineering design project. This paper describes the design and prototype implementation of this system and provides direction for future work.