MobileReminder: A Camera Phone Based Medication Reminder for Older Patients

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Non-adherence to medication is one of the most serious problems facing health care today. Older patients often find it difficult to remember when to take which medication, and in what quantities. Since older individuals are more disposed to memory loss, confusion, visual impairment, and adverse drug reactions, ensuring proper medication is a challenging goal. Although some dedicated devices exist, they often have major drawbacks. We propose to address these problems by developing a non-intrusive, compact, inexpensive, lightweight and portable solution, which integrates multiple medication reminder services with existing hardware. In this SBIR project, Applied Media Analysis, Inc. (AMA) proposes to collaborate with researchers at The Smith-Kettlewell Eye Institute to demonstrate the technical feasibility of MobileReminder, a software based add-on suite which uses existing camera enabled smart phones to provide enhanced medication reminding and verification capabilities. The software may be pre-installed in the camera phone or simply downloaded from the website. Our method considers the specific needs of older patients with low vision by integrating automatic barcode reading capabilities into the software. Our technology turns a camera phone into a personal barcode scanner which can allow patients to enroll and verify the medication-taking by a simple barcode scanning. The approach therefore avoids excessive entry which is extremely challenging for older patients with low vision. Compared with existing devices, such as Med-On Time, ALR, and the e-pill MED Timer, our camera-phone based solution will offer the following advantages: 1) camera phones have been gradually becoming a necessity for people at all ages, and no special hardware is needed; 2) MobileReminder can provide alarms with audio, visual and vibration as all these are built in camera phones; 3) Camera phones are easily programmable, providing the flexibility to easily adapt to patients' specific needs; 4) lntegrated networking capabilities allow remote monitoring and configuration options via existing protocols; 5) Integrated barcode reading capability allows patients to enroll, remove and verify the medication with a simple barcode scan; 6) Tracking can be set up so that users know when medication was taken, or adherence can be monitored at visits to the doctors office or remotely by family through network connections; and most important, 7) if successful this device will provide a new unified platform for low-vision solutions on a single device.