Development of a medication compliance system on mobile devices

Abstract

Patients may sometimes fail to comply to their medication whether it was from forgetting to take the medicine, from taking it at the wrong time or even from taking too much of it. This is called medication noncompliance or medication non-adherence. Indeed, depending to the diseases, those medications can be very complex. This noncompliance has two major consequences: it first affects the patient's health more or less seriously and it also costs billions to governments in health care.

On the other side, Andaman7 is a Synchronized Health Record that connects together patients and doctors. It is a mobile platform allowing the patient to consult and share his health record.

One key solution to medication noncompliance is to establish a better communication between the patient and the physician. It thus seems natural to use Andaman7 as a tool to enhance the non-adherence of the patients. This is the goal of this Master thesis: develop a medication compliance system integrated into Andaman7.

Using this system, the patient is able to add a medication to his medical record and also activate the reminders for this medication, so that the system will trigger a notification when it is time to take the prescribed medicine.

This manuscript will first detail all the medication compliance context before giving the details of the system, all the features that should be in it in the scope of this work, how it was designed and integrated into Andaman7, implemented, as well as some guidelines for further development, from testing strategies to others features to enhance the system.

Another topic will be addressed in this Master thesis, which is the integration of a medicine database in Andaman7. The motivation is to allow the physician or patient to be able to select a drug from a complete list of medicines. To do so, this list has to be populated with the data from an external source. This work will show how a list of drugs can be retrieved from the CBIP/BCFI database.