Medication Reminder Service for Mobile Phones: An Open Feasibility Study in Patients with Parkinson's Disease

Parkinson's disease (PD) is a neurodegenerative disorder in which drug dosing regimens become increasingly complicated with the progression of the disease. This poses a significant risk of nonadherence to drug dosing and a failure in treatment response. We hypothesized that a medication reminder delivered by short message service (SMS) could be one way to ameliorate the problem of medication errors. We conducted an open feasibility study in 50 patients with advanced PD. The subjects set up the process to receive reminders by a Web tool, after which they started to receive automatically transmitted text messages as a medication reminder for 4 weeks. In total, 35 of 50 subjects (70.0%) were able to set up the reminder system without any help. The majority (69%) of the subjects rated the set-up process as “very easy” or “easy.” Almost all (41 subjects, 91%) felt that SMS reminders worked well for them, and only 4 subjects (9%) felt that SMS texts were totally valueless. Almost half of the subjects (22 of 45, 49%) considered that there were clear benefits, and an additional 17 subjects (38%) enjoyed some benefits in using the medication reminder system. Our results indicate that an SMS medication reminder system is a feasible method, even in subjects with advanced PD.