  Objectives: Medication non-adherence is an important factor in clinical
practice and research methodology. There have been many methods of measuring
adherence yet no recognized standard for adherence. Here we conduct a software
study of the usefulness and efficacy of a mobile phone app to measure
medication adherence using photographs taken by a phone app of medications and
self-reported health measures.
  Results: The participants were asked by the app 'would help to keep track of
your medication', their response indicated 92.9% felt the app 'would you use
this app every day' to improve their medication adherence. The subjects were
also asked by the app if they 'would photograph their pills on a daily basis'.
Subject responses indicated 63% would use the app on a daily basis. By using
the data collected, we determined that subjects who used the app on daily basis
were more likely to adhere to the prescribed regimen.
  Conclusions: Pill photographs are a useful measure of adherence, allowing
more accurate time measures and more frequent adherence assessment. Given the
ubiquity of mobile telephone use, and the relative ease of this adherence
measurement method, we believe it is a useful and cost-effective approach.
However we feel the 'manual' nature of using the phone for taking a photograph
of a pill has individual variability and an 'automatic' method is needed to
reduce data inconsistency.
