A Review on Medication Identification Techniques for Visually Impaired Patients

The rapid evolution of technology has reinforced our dependency on using it in our daily life activities. The benefits of the technology can be observed not only in meeting the normal users' expectations but also in extending helping hands for people with special needs. Though technology has provided several capabilities for the visually impaired people, still they are facing some difficulties in performing many of their daily activities that require their dependence on the people around them. One of the most tiring and critical routine tasks is identifying and managing their medications, especially if they are suffering from chronic diseases and need to follow some medications regularly. Consequently, they tend to create their own systems following non-visual techniques such as identifying a medication by its odor or placing an elastic band around bottles with similar shapes. These techniques are exposed to mistakes and may lead them to take wrong medications sometimes. The use of the assistive devices, such as Barcode reader, is financially unaffordable for some patients, and it is hard to carry everywhere. Other solutions like the mobile applications depending on crowd sourcing technology compromise the visually impaired users' privacy. In this paper, we focus on investigating the literature for the possibilities offered by the computer technology to find a usable and accessible solution for the visually impaired patients to identify their medications.