Multimodal and adaptable medication assistant for the elderly: A prototype for interaction and usability in smartphones

Abstract

In order to address the elderly population higher levels of non-adherence to medication we present a mobile application to help them with medication management, providing multimodal interaction and context awareness. The application was developed following an iterative method. In each phase we identify some requirements, develop a prototype and evaluate it. The first prototype uses speech and touch as input and speech and graphical modalities as output. In addition to the traditional medication alerts, the application provides medication advices, and some provision for handling situations when the elder forgets to take the medication, in complement with classical functionalities on medication alerts to the user. Furthermore, it includes some adaptation mechanisms to the user and context of use. The results of the application tests and end-user evaluation have shown that the adaptation, the interaction based on spoken language and the recommendations had a positive impact in the users.