THE PROCESS OF ELIMINATION
Research, related works & technologies I considered
To begin to understand the problem that medical non-adherence poses, I scoured the internet for information. I came across a few research papers that have written about medical non-adherence and different solutions. After doing my research, here are related solutions and pieces of technologies that I considered when brainstorming a solution to my capstone:
RFID TAGS
One of the papers that I drew inspiration from used radio frequency identification tags (RFID) to monitor patient medication intake. The paper was written in 2017 called, "ScanAlert: Electronic Medication Monitor and Reminder to Improve Medical Adherence."
RFID tags are much like barcodes, and they are uniquely assigned to products in grocery stores, packages in the mail, or in this case, patients under a prescription schedule. Furthermore, RFID tags keep track of the particular product they are assigned to, as well as information on the product.
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ScanAlert's solution was much like mine in that they attached an RFID tag to the underside of a patient's pill bottle cap in the hopes that the patient would scan the tag after adhering to their prescription schedule.
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What deterred me from using RFID tags was the fact that it required an RFID reader, hardware that must be bought. I sought out a solution that required no outside costs, using only virtual tools to assist my system. QR codes, Google Form and Google Sheets, and notification emails are all easily and freely available.
NFC TAGS
Apart from considering RFID tags, I also considered the use of near field communication (NFC) tags. They are much like RFID tags in that they store information and need a reader to be scanned.
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In the case of NFC tags, with the iPhone X and up, scanning NFC tags is easy and built in to the hardware. NFC tags can be linked to a website or even alter iPhone configurations. For example, if you would like to use an NFC tag to immediately call home, then you may assign that action to the tag, and afterwards, every time you scan the tag with the iPhone, it immediately calls home. This is useful in situations with small children or the elderly, acting sort of like the product LifeAlert.
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In this case, I considered NFC tags to be useful in that they would be scanned after the patient intakes medication. However, what deterred me was that I would need to find a solution to alert the physician or care taker that a patient had not scanned the tag, and that would take other pieces of hardware to solve. Furthermore, using NFC tags would mean assuming the patient has an iPhone X or newer models. Thus, I stuck to using QR codes and Google Forms for its accessibility.