Did you remember your meds?

January 08, 2013

I severely strained a muscle in my back over the weekend and am laid up for a couple of days. My doc gave me a couple of prescriptions to help with the recovery which have different schedules. I've always had trouble keeping track of medications, so I looked to my droid phone for help. My first thought was to use the built-in alarm system, but this proved to be excessively time-consuming and cumbersome to carry out. I then thought I'd look to the Google Play store to see if there were any apps specifically designed for this purpose.

I found an app named MediSafe which appeared to be worth giving a shot. The Medisafe app is pretty straightforward. Once it's loaded on your Android enabled device, you can begin to use the app right away as a guest, or you can register an account, which gives you the opportunity to set up one or more people who would receive alerts if you do not mark your meds as taken within a specified time frame.

From there you can begin adding medications. You click on the + symbol in the lower left-hand corner of the home screen and this pops a new screen in which you can add the particulars for the medicine. Name, dosage, duration, time(s) of day, instructions, and caregiver (Who will receive the aforementioned alerts.) and color/shape of the pill are all configurable options. Configure the options and then click on Save at the bottom of the page. This will take you back to the home screen which should show pills in the day's quadrants that they fall in.

From there it's pretty simple. When it's time for your meds, the phone will sound an alert and a box opens up which allows you to mark them as taken, or to set it to snooze for a few minutes. As you can see below, the home screen tracks the full day's medicines in six-hour increments. Medicines which were marked as taken have the green check mark. Those with no marker are yet to be taken. I don't know if there's a symbol for missed meds as this app has helped keep me on schedule!

I thought I'd pass this find along as I'm sure there are many people out there like me who get caught up in what they're doing and end up missing doses. I hope this is of help. It has been for me.

Here's a brief video from the apps makers. Pretty cool stuff.

(Full disclosure: I have no connection to this project.)