A mobile health application for outpatients medication management

Medication errors have been identified as one of the most problematic issues in modern health-care systems. Patients are responsible for most of the intake mistakes. The most common are wrong medications (different that the ones prescribed) and administration of medications out of date, under or over doses due to erratic intakes. This paper presents SapoMed, a mobile health (m-Health) application for medication administration management. In the recent years, with the advent of mobile technologies, m-Health systems are able to provide healthcare anytime and anywhere in a pervasive way. SapoMed is a medication intake diary that tracks and manages all the prescribed medication aiming to prevent medication errors. Through visual, audio, and vibrating alerts, SapoMed keeps users aware of their medication schedule. The application allows users to register medications through the mobile phone camera to capture the barcode available at the medication boxes. It makes use of Web services to consequently retrieve all the medication information and posology. Furthermore, it uses the same Web services to save past intake medication and their intake records. The proposal was evaluated and demonstrated through a solution created for Android OS and it is ready for use.