Why Elders Forget to Take Their Meds: A Probe Study to Inform a Smart Reminding System

Medication adherence is a pervasive and difficult problem in health care that incurs tremendous cost in lives and general health, particularly among the elderly. We describe a two phase effort to develop a smart context-aware medication adherence system. In the first phase, a probe study was conducted by placing three existing reminder products in the homes of ten community-dwelling, healthy older adults to understand the contextual aspects of adherence and to inform the development of the system. We then describe the second phase of the research called CAMP (Context Aware Meds Prompting). We discuss the system that has been developed, and how we will demonstrate the efficacy of the system.