As Taiwan enters an aging society, the elderly take an average of 7.3 pills every day, but each pill looks similar. It is common to take the wrong medicine, which may affect the curative effect in some cases and may be harmful in severe cases. Endangering life. Chen Yuqun, a physician at Taipei Wing General Hospital, invented the mobile phone drug image recognition system "AIGIA Little Pharmacist". Home doctors can identify what kind of medicine a pill is just by taking a picture with their mobile phone.
There are approximately 500,000 disabled elderly people over the age of 65 in Taiwan who require long-term care. Most of these elderly people suffer from multiple chronic diseases and often need to put a variety of medicines into pill boxes for easy consumption. However, the pills are small in size and similar in color, and the drug names are easily confused. More than half of the elderly have medication errors without knowing it.
Chen Yuqun has been involved in community home care services for many years. The problem of patients repeatedly seeking medical treatment because they took the wrong medicine has been a pain for him during home visits for many years. "Recently I discovered that a bedridden old man always felt that his abdominal distension was difficult to eliminate. His family members repeatedly went to the outpatient clinic to get medicine, but it didn't work. It turned out to be because he took the wrong medicine," Chen Yuqun said, because anti-flatulence medicine and prostate medicine They are all round white pills, and they look almost exactly the same. As a result, my husband has long mistakenly taken prostate pills as anti-flatulence pills with three meals. When he originally needed to take anti-flatulence pills with three meals, he only took one pill a day. No wonder no matter how he adjusted it, The medicine is not effective.
Chen Yuqun said that Taiwan’s health insurance covers nearly 18,025 kinds of drugs. Not only are the pills small in size and similar in color to generic drugs, they are easily confused. Sometimes even doctors and pharmacists themselves cannot distinguish the type of drug from its appearance. Families of patients seek medical treatment from multiple places, including hospitals, clinics, and perhaps their own stores, which all cause serious medication problems and greatly compromise treatment. Three major problems with medication use by Taiwanese patients
Chen Yuqun analyzed that Taiwanese patients currently have three major problems with medication use: Patients like to take all the medicines apart and put them in the same box, and even the packaging is gone. I don’t know; there are more than 16,000 kinds of medicines covered by Taiwan’s health insurance, and patients store a large number of medicines at home. They are prescribed by hospitals and clinics, purchased by pharmacies, and even medicines given by neighbors next door. They have no idea what kind of medicine they are holding; even if they know it is What kind of medicine is it, but the foreign caregiver cannot understand Chinese and cannot communicate the correct way to use it.
In order to solve the problem of drug use among Taiwanese people, Chen Yuqun developed the mobile phone AIGIA Aijia Little Pharmacist APP, which is used with the drug shooting device MedBox. As long as you directly use the mobile phone camera lens to take pictures, the mobile phone can Cloud computing is used to intelligently compare the appearance of drugs, quickly determine which kind of drug it is, and display drug ingredients, indications, usage, characteristics, special warnings and other information.
Currently, the AIGIA AIGIA Little Pharmacist cloud database has built-in 18,025 types of health insurance drug information and more than 8,000 drug images. It can correctly identify 400 kinds of commonly used home medical drugs, and it also obtained a Taiwan patent last year. Currently tested at Taipei Veterans General Hospital, AIGIA’s Little Pharmacist allows home physicians and nurses to accurately identify 90% of home medications just by looking at them, and the correct medication rate is as high as 95%. Quickly identify medicines so that foreign caregivers know the correct way to use them
Chen Yuqun said that the AIGIA Love Family Pharmacist APP is mainly used by home doctors. It is expected that the IOS and Android versions will be launched at the same time by the end of this year. In order to facilitate the increasing number of people in Taiwan, As there are more foreign home caregivers, the system also has a built-in multilingual environment that can display English, Indonesian, Vietnamese and Malay, allowing caregivers to better understand the correct use of medicines.
"Taking the wrong medicine not only increases side effects, but drug interactions may also lead to unnecessary emergency hospitalization and other problems. Through mobile phone smart home medical care, AIGIA Love Home Pharmacist hopes to help every patient Family doctors at home can identify drugs faster, more accurately, and better, ensuring that patients use drugs correctly and safely," said Chen Yuqun.