UAEU students develop application that issues alerts for patients

A group of United Arab Emirates University, UAEU, students have developed an application, which includes features such as issuing alerts for patients to take their medicine on time.

The innovation by the company, "Dawak," ''Your medication" based at the UAEU Science and Innovation Park, is an application that was designed to provide medical assistance to patients, which is also linked to hospitals and pharmacies, to ensure that they take their medicine correctly.

The application sends automatic alerts to its users about the time and dose of their medication, to encourage them to follow their medical prescriptions and prevent any health implications that might result from the incorrect use of their medicine.

Yehia Aqlan, a 21-year old student of administrative information systems, who led the team of three students who developed the application, stated that he created this application after his sister Fatima, a 24-year old student of pharmaceutical studies at UAEU, said to him that many patients fail to correctly follow their medical prescriptions.

Fatima stressed that not taking medicine as prescribed can lead to the deteriorating health of patients, and to death in some cases while highlighting that they both realised the need for an automated alert to notify patients about the correct time to take their medicine, and to remind them to buy additional supplies, he added.

Shahd Abadleh, a 22-year old student of nutritional studies and the third member of the team, also highlighted the need to ensure that the patients will not forget to correctly take their medication.

The team conducted research that confirmed that the issue of patients not taking their medicine as prescribed is a common problem around the world, which causes around 125,000 deaths per year in the United States alone.

This phenomenon represents a considerable challenge to the budgets of health authorities that are already dealing with other health-related issues, as one out of every 10 patients is hospitalised due to them not following medical instructions.

The team has established a partnership with the Al Ain Pharmacy to test the application, as the first stage of expanding its services to other pharmacies in the UAE by 2018.