Towards a Mobile Cloud-Enabled Personalized and Context-Aware Drug Safety Advisory Framework for Mitigating Pharmaceutical Accidents

Accidents involving prescription and over-the-counter (OTC) medications have increased at alarming rates in recent decades. In the United States, 38,329 people died from drug-related incidents in 2010 alone. Causes of drug accidents include: complicated medication warnings, overdoses resulting from failure of patients to accurately account for their recent medicine intake, and lack of effective communication channels from regulatory authorities to patients. Towards mitigating pharmaceutical accidents, in this paper we propose a personalized, context-aware, and user-friendly drug safety advisory framework that harnesses smartphone/tablet platforms in conjunction with cloud computing technology. This system is intended to provide timely advice to a patient on whether a medicine she is considering taking is safe for her under current circumstances. This paper outlines a high-level architecture for such a framework. We also discuss the research challenges involved in designing various components of the framework and explore possible solutions.