Leveraging medication safety through mobile computing: Decision support and guidance services for adverse drug event prevention

In this paper, we present an approach for ubiquitous and pervasive access to guidance and decision support services for medication safety targeting patients/citizens and healthcare professionals, respectively. We particularly focus on Adverse Drug Event (ADE) prevention by exploiting a novel decision support framework through mobile technologies. The main aspect of our work involved tailoring the designed services to the mobile terminal and the respective user interaction. For example, we considered the technical features supported by modern mobile phones, such as Augmented Reality (AR), barcode scanning, and Near-Field Communication (NFC) tagging for identifying the drugs of interest, in order to avoid difficulties and errors in keying-in drug names by the user. We illustrate the applicability and virtue of the proposed approach via a mobile application that has been particularly designed to meet these goals.