NSF Award
1519915
The broader impact/commercial potential of this Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project is to improve human health through improved medication taking. While medications can provide significant improvements to human health, they can only do so if taken properly. Many consumers however often fail to take their medications correctly. By providing health networks a simple, cost-effective approach to medication taking oversight, focused improvement in patient adherence will directly result in fewer hospitalizations, better sustained health and improved long-term outcomes. By moving the burden of adherence monitoring away from the patient, expensive yet effective interventional practices can be focused only on those patients who actually need help, when they need it. This will both reduce labor costs and improve revenue potential for outpatient-services health networks. The product is based upon a straightforward, electronic dose-reminder and monitor system to improve and encourage self-management of medication taking while being supported by data-directed healthcare interventions. The system?s wireless data transmission allows for real-time measurement and intervention using objective medication-taking information, a process that is currently unavailable to healthcare systems and will reduce the billions of dollars spent annually in avoidable hospitalizations due to poor medication taking.<br/><br/><br/>The proposed project will focus on developing a complete, wireless, medication adherence and monitoring system. Non-adherence has been shown to lead to $100 billion in avoidable hospitalizations each year with an estimated total cost of non-adherence to be as high as $290 billion a year. Only 50% to 60% of patients adhere to their medication regimens as directed. Existing adherence systems are not solving the problem because they are expensive to implement, require unique equipment or communication technology, requires the patient to remember and input their adherence data, fails to provide actionable information in time to be useful and doesn't provide a long term view of patient adherence, amongst other factors. The project's research objectives are to fully develop the circuitry, data bridging device and programming system for a Bluetooth low energy based adherence monitoring system. The system components will then be tested in a commercial and at-home setting that will mimic real-world use and implementation. System performance and functional characteristics will be recorded and optimized. We anticipate that the completed project will provide for a fully functional, medication adherence system that can be implemented for both clinical study and commercial evaluation of patient medication taking.
