Promoting Medication Adherence by Redesigning Medical Blisters - The Smartblister approach

It is widely known and accepted in the medical field that accurate medication treatment is crucial for patient’s outcome, especially amongst patients with chronic diseases. According to World Health Organization (WHO), low level of medication adherence leads to increased mortality rate and immense medical costs. Important research efforts have been dedicated to finding an objective way to assess and increase the level of medication adherence. The aim of the Smart-Blister project is to study, design and develop a novel methodology, which uses electronic circuits embedded in the blisters to detect the exact time that a pill has been removed. The proposed methodology consists of (a) a smart blister with a passive electronic circuit directly screen printed onto the blister or onto a self-adhesive substrate (smart-label approach) using a conductive ink, and (b) a small electronic device, that activates the blister and communicates with a central information cloud computing system. The proposed design can be easily adopted and allow for potentially scalable production of low-cost smart blisters. Moreover, the activation device is reusable, can be used with various blisters and it is expected to be of low-cost.