Development of automated methadone dispenser for drug addiction therapy / Muhamad Farhan Mohd Mazlan

Muhamad Farhan , Mohd Mazlan (2024) Development of automated methadone dispenser for drug addiction therapy / Muhamad Farhan Mohd Mazlan. Masters thesis, Universiti Malaya.

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Abstract

Drug abuse and drug addiction are becoming growing issues in most countries worldwide and are considered major public health problems. An initiative has been introduced in Malaysia via the methadone maintenance treatment program since the year 2005. Although the program has shown gradual success over the years by reducing the relapse rate of the patients, it has encountered several challenges in maintaining the effectiveness of the manual dispensing method done by using syringe. Therefore, an automated methadone dispenser was developed to improve its effectiveness with the usage of peristaltic pumps and load cell sensors as the main dispensing mechanism. In this research, the reliability and feasibility of the dispenser were determined through percentage error, accuracy and repeatability, and efficiency tests, respectively. The experiment started with sugar solution preparation by dissolving 66.6mg of sugar in 50ml of distilled water. The dynamic viscosity of the sugar solution prepared is 36.680 mPa.s compared to 37.286 mPa.s for methadone syrup resulting in percentage error of 1.625%. Sugar solution was dispensed from 2ml to 50ml in increments of 2ml by using methadone dispenser and manual technique. It was found that the Pearson coefficient for methadone dispenser and manual technique is 0.998 and 0.994 respectively. Performance evaluation was carried out by comparing the volume dispensed and time taken to dispense 16 ml of sugar solution using manual technique which is syringe and beaker, and methadone dispenser for 100 runs. Based on the performance evaluation, the findings suggested that the automated methadone dispenser has contributed to the decrease in percentage error from 8.58% to 1.50% and improved dispensing time by 81.69%. The methadone dispenser also increases the dispensing accuracy by 4.0% compared to current manual methadone dispensing practices.

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