The negligence of not taking pills or vitamins would be a cause of concern for everyone. Whether you miss it or overlook the dose, it is going to cause disturbance in the body and health. HIV/AIDS patients need all the more attention in this respect.
Now Scientists at the University of Florida, in collaboration with Xhale Inc., have found that patients suffering from the human immunodeficiency virus and HIV tend to skip tablets which are prescribed to them and tend to prove perilous to themselves and other people around. That’s when experts realized that there is a need for a device to monitor the medication of the patients for a better tomorrow. To track it, a breath monitoring machine has been devised for HIV/AIDS patients.
Dr. Richard Melker, a professor of anesthesiology at the UF College of Medicine and chief technology officer for Xhale said, “This new device would be of assistance to avoid the emergence of drug-resistant strains of HIV by monitoring medication adherence in patients who are highly prone to it.”
Different therapies have been used by doctors and experts to check the time of intake of the medicines. Doctors were keen on knowing the reason behind not taking the medicines along with the time the medicines were slated to be taken at. The basic motive is that this machine should benefit the patients in clinical trials. Dr. Melkar adds that directly observed therapy, or DOT would work. The working of the machine is very simple. The machine is kept inside the patient’s home and in the prescribed time if the patient does not take the medicine then a beep noise is made by the machine. And if the patient fails to turn up then a clinical trial coordinator would be called upon by the machine automatically. It also specifies that the patient has taken the pill or not. After all these efforts it becomes inconvenient for both the patient and the clinic personal to track doctors down when they do not appear at the correct time.
This fundamental DOT allows patients to participate in it from home. The device records each breath and gets recorded in memory card or USB key to the clinic once in every month by giving them a printout of the results. Researchers say the device may prove equally helpful for monitoring adherence in clinical trials. Thus patients should establish the effectiveness and the safety of the data obtained to them.