Intelligent reminder system for taking of medicine and potential interactions

Purpose: Many studies have pointed out that chronic diseases are among the top ten causes of death. Chronic diseases require long-term medication and care. We propose an intelligent reminder system for taking of medicine and food-medicine and medicine-medicine interactions developed on the Android platform. Methods: A smartphone camera captures the image of the patient's medicine bag. Next, the image quality is enhanced with contrast and saturation enhancement method. Finally, the important characters are extracted and recognized. All of the information about the prescribed medicines is stored in the medicine database within the smartphone. The system provides reminders to take medicine and of possible food-medicine and medicine-medicine interactions. Finally, medical ontology is applied to make users aware of the relationships of foods and medicines. Results: We used survey questionnaire to test the efficiency of the system. The results showed 94% user satisfaction. When people are busy they can forget to take their medicine or may eat foods that interact with the medicine, leading to reduced efficacy of the medicine or potentially dangerous reactions. With this system, efficacy increased from 72% to 92%. From the experimental results, our system is beneficial for people requiring long-term medication. Conclusion: The proposed scheme was especially developed for the Android platform. It consists of the extraction of medicine bag information, reminder to take medicine and confirmation that the medicine has been taken, as well as information regarding potential interactions. It was evaluated and verified by a large number of users, doctors and nurses.