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TIME: Almanac 1990
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1990 Time Magazine Compact Almanac, The (1991)(Time).iso
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time
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060589
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06058900.002
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1990-09-17
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TECHNOLOGY, Page 70Adultproof CapA way to keep patients honest
Take your medicine," the doctor says. But as many as half of
all patients take that advice too lightly. They often skip doses,
ingest them at the wrong intervals or even neglect their pills for
days or weeks at a time, drastically reducing the chances that the
medication will be effective.
Later this year Aprex, a company based in Fremont, Calif., will
begin marketing a high-tech medicine bottle designed to help
doctors make sure that patients obey orders. Called MEMS (for
medication event monitoring system), the container comes with a
tiny computer chip embedded in its cap. When the patient takes off
the cap to remove a pill, the chip records the day and time. At the
patient's next checkup, the doctor can ask for the bottle back.
Then the physician inserts the cap into a special electronic
machine that analyzes the data contained in the chip and lets the
doctor know how regularly the pills were taken.
The product has already proved valuable in several clinical
trials of new drugs. Neurologists using MEMS bottles in a Yale
University study of a treatment for epilepsy found that two-thirds
of the seizures suffered by the patients occurred at times when
they had not taken the proper dosage of the medicine. Dr. John
Urquhart, a co-founder of Aprex, thinks MEMS bottles can "save
lives and minimize unnecessary hospitalization and diagnostic
tests."