A machine learning approach for medication adherence monitoring using body-worn sensors

One of the most important challenges in chronic disease self-management is medication non-adherence, which has irrevocable outcomes. Although many technologies have been developed for medication adherence monitoring, the reliability and cost-effectiveness of these approaches are not well understood to date. This paper presents a medication adherence monitoring system by user-activity tracking based on wrist-band wearable sensors. We develop machine learning algorithms that track wrist motions in real-time and identify medication intake activities. We propose a novel data analysis pipeline to reliably detect medication adherence by examining single-wrist motions. Our system achieves an accuracy of 78.3% in adherence detection without need for medication pillboxes and with only one sensor worn on either of the wrists. The accuracy of our algorithm is only 7.9% lower than a system with two sensors that track motions of both wrists.