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

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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:	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

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