The Lab
The challenge
Medication diary - it will help elderly people to take the right medicines and doze on time. It will also help the user or the guardian to more easily monitor and track the overall use of medicines by the user.
The context
A large number of social service beneficiaries forget to take their medicine or forget which medicine and in what dose they have to take it on a daily/weekly basis. The application will remind (alarm) them that they must take a specific medicine in a specific dose and at a specific time. Application can also send an alarm message to a paired user (e.g., family member) that the user didn't take (check boxed) the specific medicine so paired user can check that with the user.
Relevance
The application (or some other solution) will reduce the feeling of worry for the user and potentially for their loved ones. In addition, it can monito whether the drugs are used in the prescribed manner.
Prerequisites and boundary conditions
- Social service provider has a basic digital literacy and a working smartphone.
- Someone is needed to put all the medicine and create a schedule if user (elderly person) can't do that alone.
Possible solutions
This is only an indicative proposal of possible solutions:
A mobile app for smart phones which will monitor and alarm the users to take the specific medicine in the specific dose and at the specific time. It also has a visual interface with the names and pictures of the medicine. Application tracks the use of medicine - e.g., when app alarms the user to take the medicine, user needs to check box the medicine so app can track that the user probably took the medicine. It can also summarise the data to check if the medicines are used regularly, on a prescribed basis or can send a message to a paired user (e.g., family member, Geronto-housekeeper that the user didn't check box specific medicine).
Excluded technologies
Expensive, hard to use, without GUI.
Existing technologies / system to integrate the solution
Android OS / IOS on the mobile smartphones.