memorAIs: an Optical Character Recognition and Rule-Based Medication Intake Reminder-Generating Solution

Memory-based medication non-adherence is an unsolved problem that is responsible for considerable disease burden in the United States. Digital medication intake reminder solutions with minimal onboarding requirements that are usable at the point of medication acquisition may help to alleviate this problem by offering a low barrier way to help people remember to take their medications. In this paper, we propose memorAIs, a digital medication intake reminder solution that mitigates onboarding friction by leveraging optical character recognition strategies for text extraction from medication bottles and rule based expressions for text processing to create configured medication reminders as local device calendar invitations. We describe our ideation and development process, as well as limitations of the current implementation. memorAIs was the winner of the Patient Safety award at the 2023 Columbia University DivHacks Hackathon, presented by the Patient Safety Technology Challenge, sponsored by the Pittsburgh Regional Health Initiative.