LET-ME: An electronic device to help elderly people with their home medications

Abstract

Recent literature reports on high adverse events rate, especially among elderly people, due to bad self-administration of their drug therapy. They make errors taking wrong drugs, or taking drugs with incorrect dosage and frequency. These "therapy errors", in the USA, cause about 3,000,000 hospital admissions each year. Within the medical informatics community, different research groups are developing computer-based support systems addressing this problem. This paper presents a novel approach in this area, and describes a device to make home drug therapy as safe as possible. The system designed took into account the whole process, starting from drug prescription by the general practitioner, to the drug acquisition to the chemist and, finally, to drug assumption at home. © 2009 Springer Berlin Heidelberg.