Medication adherence is an important indicator for assessing whether patients follow medical advice during treatment， and its level directly affects disease control and the quality of life of patients. Therefore， accurate and effective assessment is essential for chronic disease management and intervention. This paper takes chronic obstructive pulmonary disease （COPD） and asthma， two types of chronic respiratory diseases， as representative to review the existing measurement methods and current application status of medication adherence. It is found that the existing assessment methods for medication adherence can be categorized into objective measurement methods and subjective measurement methods. Objective measures include drug concentration monitoring， pill counting， and electronic medication devices， which generally offer high accuracy. Subjective measures include physician assessments， inhalation technique evaluations， and questionnaires. While these methods are straightforward and easy to implement， their accuracy is often influenced by the subjective factors of assessors of patients， which may lead to biased results. Currently， there is still a lack of a universally accepted “gold standard” for evaluating medication adherence. Selecting the appropriate measurement method requires a comprehensive consideration of factors such as research objectives， disease type， patient characteristics， and data availability to ensure the validity and reliability of the assessment results.