Accepted for/Published in: JMIR Mental Health
Date Submitted: Jul 13, 2023
Open Peer Review Period: Jul 13, 2023 - Sep 7, 2023
Date Accepted: Oct 10, 2023
(closed for review but you can still tweet)
Efficacy of Smartphone App in Enhancing Medication Adherence and Accuracy in individuals with Schizophrenia during the COVID-19 Pandemic: A Randomized Controlled Trial
ABSTRACT
Background:
Poor medication adherence or inaccuracy in taking prescribed medications play an important role in the recurrence or worsening of psychiatric symptoms in patients with schizophrenia, and the COVID-19 pandemic impacted their medication adherence with exacerbated symptoms or relapse. The use of mobile health services (mHealth) increased during the COVID-19 pandemic, and their role in improving mental health is becoming clear.
Objective:
This study aimed to explore the effectiveness of a smartphone app (MedAdhere) on medication adherence and accuracy among patients with schizophrenia and to measure their psychiatric symptoms and cognitive functions.
Methods:
In this 12-week experimental study, participants were provided intervention with MedAdhere app, and data were collected between June 2021 and Septermber 2022. One-hundred five participants were randomly assigned to the experimental or control group. The Positive and Negative Syndrome Scale (PANSS) and Mini-Mental State Examination (MMSE) were used to measure the participants’ psychiatric symptoms and cognitive functions. Generalized estimating equations was used for data analysis.
Results:
A total of 94 participants met the inclusion criteria and completed the protocol, and the medication adherence rate of the experimental group was 94.74% during the intervention. Psyotic symptoms (positive, negative and general psychopathology symptoms) and cognitive functions (memory, language and executive function) were significantly improved in the experimental group than in the control group after the intervention.
Conclusions:
MedAdhere app can effectively and significantly improve the medication adherence and thereby the psychiatric symptoms of patients with schizophrenia. This artificial intelligence (AI)-assisted app can be extended to all patients who need to be reminded to take medication on schedule.
Citation
Request queued. Please wait while the file is being generated. It may take some time.
Copyright
© The authors. All rights reserved. This is a privileged document currently under peer-review/community review (or an accepted/rejected manuscript). Authors have provided JMIR Publications with an exclusive license to publish this preprint on it's website for review and ahead-of-print citation purposes only. While the final peer-reviewed paper may be licensed under a cc-by license on publication, at this stage authors and publisher expressively prohibit redistribution of this draft paper other than for review purposes.