Monitoring medication intake and adherence assessment

Prescribed medication becomes a truly effective intervention if it is coupled with efficient service delivery. In such circumstances patients have the opportunity to realize their potential and to become functioning and productive members of their communities. Key components of efficient service delivery are timely detection of non-adherence to medication and rapid response by mental health professionals to any signs of impeding relapse. In this paper, we shall describe a home care application for monitoring medication adherence and show an algorithm for assessment of medication adherence based on image processing and analysis. This algorithm reconstructs color images from data of the timestamp a patient accesses a medication dispenser and calculates the index for assessment of the patient's medication adherence from the entropy of the image.