You want to be good and stick to your pill regimen, but you find yourself forgetting your pills here and there, and eventually forgetting your pills altogether. You ought to take your pills, because your doctor said your health depends on it. You want to take your pills because your family wants to see you healthy. You try to stick to your pill routine but for one reason or another you don’t take your pills, and a wave of guilt washes over you. You are not alone – according to the World Health Organization, 50% of people taking medications fail to stick with their medication schedule. It doesn’t have to be this way. I have an answer to this problem, and it’s actually quite simple.

Before talking about the solution, let’s understand a little more about the problem. There have been a number of public health studies that attributed various circumstances with low medication adherence such as low health literacy, managing too many prescriptions, and lack of adequate family and social support. Some of these are environmental factors and things we generally cannot control, but in order to fix a problem, we should only focus on factors that we can control. If we have a lot of pills to manage, use a pill box to organize them. If we keep forgetting to take them, use an alarm (or even an app) to help remind us to take them. If the medication is important enough, someone close to us (a spouse, a family member, or a best friend) will likely know we’re taking these medications and will want to see us be compliant. All these things should happen, but for 50% of us, it doesn’t. Why?

Good Intentions are not enough to have Good Habits

I take a couple of prescription pills as well as a couple of supplements, and I also throw in an additional zinc supplement during cold season. My local pharmacy had a promotion and was giving away free pill boxes, so I took one and found them to be pretty useful when taking even just one pill a day. There was a stretch though where my daily routine was sporadic so I kept forgetting to take my pills in the morning. I tried setting an alarm on my phone, but whenever the alarm rings I would never be near my pill, so I would turn off the alarm and resume whatever I was doing but forget to take my pills later. My system wasn’t working. I eventually came across the work by B.J. Fogg to understand why.

Motivation can be high but if it’s hard to do (Ability), then it’s less likely that you would routinely do it. Action requires a trigger (later called a Prompt), and Behavior happens when Motivation, Ability, and a Prompt come together at the same moment. When explained like a math equation it sounds dry and impractical, but yeah this stuff works. You don’t have to take my word for it – just look to Uber, Google, and Facebook. They adopted Fogg’s Behavior Model in Silicon Valley and achieved wild success. Actually in some cases, a little too good – it was partly to blame for smartphone addiction, and ironically Fogg is also trying to use his behavior model to dial it back.

Use the right tools to stay on track

Dr. Fogg is not the only advocate for simple habits – others such as James Clear and Leo Babatu are champions of making simple habits to help us improve ourselves. It should be noted that a similar model, called the Technology Acceptance Model, states that Usefulness combined with Ease of Use are necessary for a technology to be adopted.

So what options do we have with taking pills? I’m assuming that we are all starting with good intentions, either because we want good health for ourselves or for our loved ones who care about us. To make pill taking more organized, studies have shown that pill boxes can be very helpful, as well as alarms as reminders when to take the pills (W.H.O. report). Mobile apps can be even more useful than alarms, but we run the risk of overcomplicating things when we bring in more sophisticated technologies. For example, there are a number of electronic pillboxes in the market that can cost between $500-$1,000, and their level of sophistication can make them intimidating, particularly for elderly people who may be tech-averse. These electronic pillboxes do offer one valuable feature – the ability to actually capture electronically when a pill has been taken. Mobile apps that are not associated with an electronic pill box rely on the person to manually record that they took their pills – if they are like me though, I may have a tendency of turning off my alarm, but later forget to actually take the pills. Based on Fogg’s Behavior Model, the ideal approach would make the Prompt (the mobile app alert) turn into a simple Ability of physically taking the pills.

I believe I found this approach. Rather than making the pillbox a sophisticated electronic device, the smartphone is both the most widely available and also the most sophisticated electronic device that people have. The pillbox can be simple, but when combined with the smartphone it can be a pretty powerful pill manager. Pilltrax is simple pillbox with a unique 2D barcode marked at the bottom of each pill compartment, and when the user takes their pills they can use the Pilltrax app on their smartphone to automatically scan the code and confirm that the pills were taken. If you forget to scan your pill, then an alert can be sent to a caregiver or a loved one.

It’s simple, but that is the key. It needs to be simple. 50% medication compliance is unacceptably low, and I do not believe it’s due to lack of motivation. People want good health for themselves and their loved ones, and the purpose of technology should be to make our lives better.

Good Habits are made by combining good intentions with simple habits. With the right tools, anything can be made simple.