UC San Diego

Glaucoma, the leading cause of irreversible blindness, affects more than 70 million people worldwide. Lowering intraocular pressure, the most common method of delaying both the development and progression of glaucoma, is typically done with daily topical administration of therapeutic eye drops, which has notoriously high non-adherence rates ranging from 30% to 80%. The advent of smart phone enabled technologies creates an opportunity to address the non-adherence problem. However, previous eyedrop electronic monitoring solutions had awkward medication bottle adjuncts and crude software design for monitoring the administration of a drop which adversely affected their ability to foster significant, sustainable improvements in adherence. Here we present our prototype, “smart drop” bottle, that is capable to detect each eyedrop medication administered while maintaining the shape or size of the eyedrop bottle. This is achieved by developing a smart-phone application that interact with small rigid-flex electronics beneath the bottle and bottle label respectively. We have shown we can achieve wireless communication close to 100 feet with 0% of false positive results thus providing a potential solution for adherence monitoring of glaucoma patients.