Design and Implementation of a Voice-Based Medical Alert System for Medication Adherence

Non-adherence to prescribed medical treatment is a major health problem especially with chronic diseases such as HIV/AIDS, Diabetes, Tuberculosis and Malaria for which medication adherence is very critical especially in outpatient setting. This paper presents a voice-based mobile medical alert system (Voice MedAlert) for outpatient adherence. The system runs on client server architecture responsible for data processing. The client (front end) gets user input and gives or shows the result, while the server (back end) does storage, security and major data processing. The front-end makes use of Hypertext Markup Language and PHP, while the back-end uses MYSQL database and PHP (Hypertext Pre-processor). The voice API (Application Program Interface) used is TWILIO REST API. The adoption of voice-based applications could greatly reduce non-adherence of patients to treatment regimen because they allow appointments and prescription information to be captured and heard through voice response rather than in the physician’s handwriting. © 2013 Published by Elsevier Ltd. Selection and/or peer-review under responsibility of CENTERIS/ProjMAN/HCIST.