Monitoring and Estimating Medication Abuse

Abstract

Prescription medication abuse is a major healthcare problem and can lead to addiction syndrome, higher healthcare cost, and serious harm to patients. Smart health can play a major role in addressing medication abuse by monitoring patient's health conditions and medication consumption, and, by connecting with healthcare professionals and utilizing suitable interventions. More specifically, medication behavior can be analyzed using information from smart medication systems, specialized wearable sensors and/or mobile devices with patient-entered consumption data. In this paper, we study monitoring systems to predict current abuse and near-future addiction and provide interventions to reduce medication abuse. The future work involves development and evaluation of Ab-Med mobile app for monitoring medication consumption and comprehensive cost effectiveness of interventions for medication abuse.