Abstract
Purpose :
Patients are not always compliant with their prescribed regimens. We designed a portable imaging device for monitoring how patients use their eye drops in daily life. The system helps doctors to understand patients’ actual compliance and to adjust their treatment regimens based on objective compliance data.
Methods :
The device is a handheld compacted system with a built-in battery, a micro-USB port and supports up to 64 G storage card. 11 subjects aged between 65 to 97 years old used this device. The device was evaluated using 120 eye drop bottles of various sizes or from different manufacturers. The main outcome is video assessments of eye drop usage process. The number of drops that landed in eye and out of eye was determined.
Results :
All eye drops applications in 20 eyes of 11 subjects were recorded in clinic. The success rates ranged from 16.67% to 100% and average 75.78%. Only 2 eyes delivered the correct number of eye drops. The device worked with 90.8% eye drop bottles (109/120) tested.
Conclusions :
Our study demonstrates that the successful application of eye drops is a problem for patients. Our imaging and monitoring device is a powerful tool to help doctors obtain objective performance data on each patient allowing them to adjust each patient’s treatment to best meet their personal needs, for the portable device can clearly record how patients use eye drops anytime and anywhere they would normally use them.
This is an abstract that was submitted for the 2018 ARVO Annual Meeting, held in Honolulu, Hawaii, April 29 - May 3, 2018.