Healthcare app for controlling medication intake, CuePath
05/05/2017CuePath Innovation is a Canadian healthcare IoT startup that offers tools for tracking loved ones’ medication usage, thereby reducing risk of missing a scheduled intake or taking more pills than necessary.
Patients receive an intelligent blister pack with a set of pills for consumption at exact dates and times. Pharmacists use a web application to create schedules of prescribed medications. Patient’s relatives (children, grandchildren, etc.) or physicians can monitor the accuracy of taken pills through a mobile app and receive phone alerts in a case of missed medication intake or possible overdose.
The solution consists of three components: a progressive web app (PWA) for patient’s relatives to control the medication intake, a web application for pharmacists to schedule medication consumption plans and a web application for system owners to oversee and control the process.
Project’s components
Helps relatives or physicians to monitor adherence with scheduled medication intake. The application is developed according to progressive web app (PWA) standards.
Control panel for monitoring all project’s processes.
Helps pharmacists to create and customize medication intake schedules and monitor their timely fulfilment.
Mobile Solution for Patient Care
First things first
Patient’s profile displays the most important information: diagnosis and brief personal information, which helps to determine criticality degree of missed or delayed medication intake. The gathered medication intake history, generated by information received from active blisters, demonstrates prescribed treatment course’s degree of success.
Patients’ relatives receive text messages or phone alert notifications in cases of missed or untimely medication intake.
How does this work
Each blister pack has a sensor coating and integrity control device built in. If the integrity of the sensor coating is violated, the blister pack sends the coordinates of the rupture to the centralized server using provided wireless hub device. The coordinates are compared with cell positions, opening time and appropriate treatment course. If a deviation is detected, automatic notification is sent to the pharmacist, patient’s physician and designated family member.
Treatment course duration
Patient’s medication intake progress is displayed on the screen:
- Cell rupture status;
- Correct/incorrect time of medication intake.
Problems with medication intake are clearly marked graphically with an accompanying message provided to inform the viewer.
The system takes into account a variety of situations that may arise when taking medications, from changing treatment course’s beginning weekday to flexible setup of alerts depending on patient’s various actions.
Web Application for Service Management
The overview screen displays key information about solution’s processes:
- New requests from pharmacies;
- Alarm signals;
- List of disconnected devices;
- List of most problematic patients.
Each patient’s equipment set consists of a wireless hub device that provides communication between blister packs and the central server.
Company employees can monitor the status of each device that’s included in the kit and quickly contact any patient, if needed.
How do the devices interact?
Each blister pack has a clip that sends information about current integrity status of blister packs to the wireless hub device (HUB). The HUB, in its turn, transfers that information to the centralized server for further data update throughout all system interfaces.
Users with administrator privileges have access to patients’ blister pack states.
Pharmacy and hospital requests are handled manually by CuePath Innovation administrators, while the service management system helps with recordkeeping and monitoring of request statuses.
Web Application for Configuring Blister Packs
The List of Users makes it easy to navigate while searching for basic information on each patient.
Patient’s profile displays all necessary information that is accessed by pharmacists or physicians: completed treatment course statistics and the status of recently used active blister pack.
When setting up a blister pack for a treatment course, the pharmacist chooses appropriate weekdays and timeframes for consumption of medication sets. It is possible to set the course’s start date to any day of the week.
Project’s components
Helps relatives or physicians to monitor adherence with scheduled medication intake. The application is developed according to progressive web app (PWA) standards.
Control panel for monitoring all project’s processes.
Helps pharmacists to create and customize medication intake schedules and monitor their timely fulfilment.
Technologies
Server-side business logic is based on Node.js Express Framework with MongoDB used for database development. The client-side is based on AngularJS Framework with Ionic Framework components. The build is realized with Webpack module bundler.
IBM Bluemix cloud platform is used for software and hardware environment.
