Adherence, Avatars and Where to From Here.

Adherence to medication and treatment regimen continues to rank as one of the major clinical problems worldwide. Many of the currently available strategies lack the personalised interaction needed in order to effectively connect with the patients. Our solution is to develop an interactive avatar-based reminder application to simulate a human carer to provide customised conversations with the aim of improving adherence and satisfaction. The results of our initial trial showed that information and communication provided by the avatar were useful in reminding participants to take their health supplements. This paper discusses the importance of personalised communication and information in improving adherence and satisfaction, what we have learned from our initial trial with the avatar-based reminder application, and our proposed modifications for our next trial.

Simulating Human Carer with an Avatar to Improve Medication Adherence.

Non-adherence to medication and treatment regimens is considered as a major issue in the healthcare industry as it can lead to negative consequences. Various strategies have been applied to improve adherence, however many of these strategies lack the interaction and personalisation-aspect which has been shown to be crucial to the patients. This paper discusses the importance of personalised interaction in improving patients' medication adherence, and the characteristics needed in an avatar to simulate such human-human interactions.

Current Trends in Electronic Medication Reminders for Self Care.

Poor adherence to medication can lead to negative health outcomes and increased financial burdens. We present a literature review on electronic medication reminders used for medication adherence in self care settings, to identify current and possible future trends. A structured PubMed search based on extracted MeSH terms provided a total of 45 publications which were identified as most relevant. Three main categories of electronic solutions were identified: mobile phone reminders, in-home electronic reminder devices, and portable reminder devices.

Gerontechnology: the importance of user participation in ICT development for older adults.

With the ageing of our society and the increasing pressure on health and aged care services, the need for technological solutions to help older people stay in their own home for as long as possible is becoming increasingly important. To create information and communications technology (ICT) that will fit with the way older people live their lives and wish to use technology, necessitates their involvement in the design and development process. This paper will highlight some of the issues when designing for and with older people, and highlights the need for more research on how to involve older persons as stakeholders when designing technology for their use, as well as the need for easily accessible guidelines for how to do this.

Electronic medical record information system for patient consultations in Chinese medicine.

Currently there are no widely used systems to electronically record individual patient consultations with Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) practitioners. As TCM practice differs significantly from western medicine both in diagnosis and treatment, using information systems created for western medicine is not suitable. There is a need for information systems developed specifically for TCM practitioners to manage patient consultation and treatments. Such system should be designed to facilitate safe and effective practice by providing decision support, utilising existing knowledge such as known herb-drug interactions to signal safety risks. Utilising current and developing standards and vocabularies such as those developed by the World Health Organisation (WHO) is important to facilitate interoperability with other systems. To facilitate continued growth in consumer demand, this type of system should be compatible with the needs of the individual electronic health records and other medical systems, and provide interfaces to external systems such as Medicare, pathology and radiology systems, and insurance systems. This paper presents the high level design of a patient consultation system for TCM practitioners that addresses the individual practitioner's needs for health records entry, storage, retrieval, display and support in managing health care delivery to patients and be part of Australia's emerging e-health system.