WiseMed: Medication reminder for seniors

Abstract

Today, many people are very busy with their daily lives, so they may forget to take their medications on schedule, and their medication treatments may not be as effective as they are supposed to be. Several medication reminder applications for smartphones are already available in Thailand, but most of them share a general limitation that users need to enter their medication information and schedule by themselves. This limitation can lead to a new, serious problem: users inputting erroneous medication information or schedules into their smart-phones, especially elderly users. This paper proposes a medication reminder application that overcomes this problem. To eliminate this kind of critical data entry error, we retrieves information on the user's medication and schedule by scanning the QR code on the medication package. This application is not only able to automatically remind users to take their medication on schedule but also provides the user with basic and crucial medication information such as directions for use, precautions, and side effects. Moreover, the application also keeps track of a user's medication-taking history over time, so the physician can modify the medication schedule or the user behavior in his or her follow-up visit in order for the treatment to be as effective as possible. The evaluations demonstrate that QR code mitigate the seniors' errors by 42%. Additionally, our pipeline can identify the user's medication-taking behavior that violate the time-critical scheduled medications with almost perfect correlation with a standard guideline. Finally, all medical professionals confirm that our medication-taking report is crucial and very helpful.