A review of medication adherence monitoring technologies

Abstract

Medication non-adherence is a prevalent, complex problem. Failure to follow medication schedules may lead to major health complications, including death. Proper medication adherence is thus required in order to gain the greatest possible drug benefit during a patient’s treatment. Interventions have been proven to improve medication adherence if deviations are detected. This review focuses on recent advances in the field of technology-based medication adherence approaches and pays particular attention to their technical monitoring aspects. The taxonomy space of this review spans multiple techniques including sensor systems, proximity sensing, vision systems, and combinations of these. As each technique has unique advantages and limitations, this work describes their trade-offs in accuracy, energy consumption, acceptability and user’s comfort, and user authentication.