SmartMATES for Medication Adherence Using Non-intrusive Wearable Sensors

According to the National institute on Aging, 8% of the world’s population is over 65 or older. There is a need for a long term care and a remote home-care environment for the aging population using smart technologies as this number expected to double by 2050. With the advancement of embedded sensing technologies, wireless sensing technologies have been used to monitor user’s activities and maintain a healthy lifestyle. In this paper, we develop a Smart Medication Alert and Treatment Electronic Systems (SmartMATES) using a non-intrusive wearable sensor system to detect and prevent a home-based patient from missing his or her medication. The sensor collects and processes both the accelerometer and radio signal strength measurement on the left and right wrist. Based on the data collected, SmartMATES correlates the left and right wrist accelerometer reading to model the action of taking medication. If SmartMATES detects the patient is not taking the medication within a time-frame, it will be send an alert to the mobile phone to remind the users to take their medication. We have evaluated the SmartMATES on 9 participants. The results show that the SmartMATES can identify and prevent missing dosage in a less intrusive way than existing mobile application and traditional approaches.