Among the various potential Android Medical Applications for patient management, this post will cover the applications that could be developed for remote monitoring of patients.
One of the challenges usually doctors/physicians face , is that whether patients have taken their medications or not. This is even more challenging in case if the patient has to taken medicine for longer periods( e.g. couple of months).
Mobile applications could come in handy to ensure if the patients have taken their medicines or not. The application could be a simple reminder service which could be installed on patient’s phone (with patient’s consent) with reminders set for medication dosage and times. Another option could be a reminder sms sent to the patient’s phone( In most of countries except US, incoming Sms is free).
In developing countries, where doctor/physician to population ratio is very low, these applications could be more helpful. Incentives could also be added for patients to take their medicines with the help of sponsor(e.g. local mobile company or local grocer ).
I found an interesting article in The Economist titled ” Taken your medicine? “, where patients were given incentives to take medicine and report back. The trial done in Nicaragua involving 30 people with tuberculosis was a success and a second is about to be carried out in Pakistan, where a batch of 400 XoutTB patches is arriving this month. The details regarding the project in Pakistan from the article are below:-
” Conditions in Karachi, the Pakistani city in which the trial is being conducted, could politely be described as “challenging”. According to Rachel Glennerster, a member of the XoutTB team who has worked as an economist at the IMF and the British Treasury, the local medical clinics are closed about 60% of the time and doctors or nurses are often absent during the 40% when the doors are nominally open. Such absences—and the associated lack of compliance-monitoring—are some of the problems for which XoutTB is designed to compensate.
Pakistan, though, presents a second difficulty. Aamir Khan, the director of XoutTB’s operations in the country, quickly discovered that one of the neediest groups of people there are 15- to 25-year-old women. Unfortunately, they are often under the thumbs of their parents or husbands and are not allowed mobile phones of their own. Dr Khan is therefore considering the idea of a different reward—high-energy food supplements to combat malnutrition. The system would not supply food directly, but would instead top up credit at the patient’s grocer using an automatic link.
If XoutTB does work, the team has ambitions to extend it. Other drugs can also be a nuisance to remember. The anti-retrovirals used to combat AIDS, for example, have to be taken for the rest of a patient’s life. And taking medicines for non-infectious conditions such as diabetes and high blood pressure is also a chore. Find the right “litmus test”, though, and what is now being done with TB drugs could succeed with any of these as well. Taking your medicine could, at last, become a truly rewarding experience. “
