A participatory sensing study to understand the problems older adults faced in developing medication-taking habits

Valenzuela-Beltrán, Maribel, Andrade, Angel, Stawarz, Katarzyna ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9021-0615 and Rodríguez, Marcela 2022. A participatory sensing study to understand the problems older adults faced in developing medication-taking habits. Healthcare 10 (7) , 1238. 10.3390/healthcare10071238

PDF - Published Version Available under License Creative Commons Attribution. Download (1MB)

Abstract

Past research has demonstrated that older adults tend to use daily activities as cues to remember to take medications. However, they may still experience medication non-adherence because they did not select adequate contextual cues or face situations that interfere with their medication rou-tines. This work addresses two research questions: 1) How does the association that older adults establish between their daily routines and their medication-taking enable them to perform it con-sistently? 2) What problems do they face in associating daily routines with medication-taking? For 30 days, using a mixed-methods approach, we collected quantitative and qualitative data from four participants aged 70-73 years old about their medication-taking. We confirm that older adults who matched their medication regimens to their habitual routines obtained better results on time-based consistency measures. The main constraints for using daily routines as contextual cues were the insertion of medication-taking into broad daily routines, the association of multiple daily routines with medication-taking, the lack of strict daily routines, and the disruption of daily routines. We argue that the strategies proposed by literature for forming medication-taking habits should support their formulation by measuring patients’ dosage patterns and generating logs of their daily activities.

Item Type:	Article
Date Type:	Publication
Status:	Published
Schools:	Schools > Computer Science & Informatics
Additional Information:	This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).
Publisher:	MDPI
ISSN:	2227-9032
Date of First Compliant Deposit:	4 July 2022
Date of Acceptance:	23 June 2022
Last Modified:	13 May 2023 12:36
URI:	https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/150844

Actions (repository staff only)

Edit Item