MoviPill: A Mobile Game for Medication Adherence

With MoviPill, we explored a narrow but difficult question: could a social game help older adults remember daily medication and take it closer to the prescribed time?

Our mobile application placed participants in small groups and awarded points for taking medication on schedule. Eighteen older adults used it over six weeks. We saw improvements in remembering medication and in the timing of each dose. Among participants who expressed some interest in games, the improvement in timely adherence rose from 43% to 56%.

The result was not uniform. Interest in games affected the response, which suggested that persuasive health systems should adapt to the people using them rather than assume that competition motivates everyone.

This was a small, short study. Our participants already tended to be disciplined about medication, and there was no reminders-only condition separating the effect of the game from the effect of receiving prompts. We called for longer studies with more varied participants, regions, and cultures.

MoviPill continued an earlier line of mobile health and behavior-change work represented by HealthGear and TripleBeat, but focused specifically on medication adherence.

Publication

@inproceedings{deoliveira2010movipill,
  author = {Rodrigo De Oliveira and Mauro Cherubini and Nuria Oliver},
  title = {{MoviPill}: Improving Medication Compliance for Elders Using a Mobile Persuasive Social Game},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the 12th ACM International Conference on Ubiquitous Computing (UbiComp 2010)},
  pages = {251--260},
  year = 2010,
  doi = {10.1145/1864349.1864371},
  cites = 174,
  citesdate = {2026-03-23}
}

Related patent

@patent{deoliveira2013medication,
  author = {De Oliveira, Rodrigo and Cherubini, Mauro and Oliver, Nuria},
  title = {Medication compliance using persuasive computing},
  number = 8439758,
  type = {patentus},
  year = 2013,
  note = {Priority 2010-02-15, Filed 2011-02-14, Granted 2013-05-14},
  cites = 3
}