A Pharmaceutical Intelligent Information System to detect allergies and Adverse Drugs Reactions based on internet of things

The incidence of serious and fatal Adverse Drugs Reaction (ADR) and harmful effects of pharmaceutical excipients in worldwide hospitals is extremely high. Some studies show a rate of ADR appearance about 6.5% in worldwide hospitals. The consequences of these cases lead to a rate of 80% of ADR incidences that require the patient admission, a medium bed stay of eight days, a cost of $847m and an overall death rate of 0.15%. Most of these consequences can be avoided. For this reason, a drugs checker based on Internet of things and a knowledge-based system is proposed in this paper to detect ADRs and allergy interactions. Specifically, the patient's terminal identifies the drugs by means of either NFC (Near Field Communication) or barcode, using common devices such as cellular phones, PDAs or PCs. This information is matched with the Pharmaceutical Intelligent Information System to detect whether a drug or product is compatible with its allergy profile and Electronic Health Record (EHR) or not. The system is being tested with a first approximation based on smart phones and a real patient which suffer a non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drug (NSAID) intolerance. This patient cannot tolerate some Active Ingredients (AI) such as ibuprofen. Therefore, when the patient checks a drug that contains one of the not tolerated AI, the system warns the patient about the incompatibility with his allergy profile and EHR, by means of a friendly interface.