Ask HN: What is the best way to setup medicine reminders for my dad? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What is the best way to setup medicine reminders for my dad?

12 pointsconfusedson16 comments

My dad is 70 years old and has a whole bunch of pills that he needs to take. He keeps forgetting to take his medication and I've been trying to come up with the best reminder system for this. I've tried installing a whole bunch of apps on his phone which do this but nothing has worked very well. He has an iPhone and the Apple Watch, and I am looking for a system that works across both these devices. If it also integrates with the Google Home then thats a bonus. He has poor vision so accessibility on the app is super important. Is this a problem that any of you have solved for your parents?

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Does he have a pill box?

If not, get a transparent pillbox with compartments for every day of the week (you can also get them with separate compartments for morning / evening).

Then put it in a place that he will always see it (eg. kitchen table).

No need for an app, and it's easy to check if he already took his meds or not.

Apps or other things are kinda bad, because you can silence the alarm and then forget to take the meds, or he can accidentally take the meds twice.

If all the doses for the week are prepared ahead of time, these mistakes are not so easy to make.

This is exactly the problem. If he's in the middle of something and the reminder goes off, he silences the alarm and then forgets about it. I need a way to repeat the alarm if he hasn't taken the pills.

What about an app that forces you to take a photo of the pillbox before and after taking the pills?

Perhaps you can skip the "before" photo, but it may help to reduce double doses.

If the contrast is high and you can calibrate the app using photos of an empty pillbox somehow, it doesn't look imposible. On the other hand https://xkcd.com/1425/

Haha you also forget that if he could remember to do all of this then I wouldnt be posting this in the first place!

IANAMD, im just wandering if something like this may work:

* The app has an alarm (like a clock). You can configure the time, let's say 9am.

* When it rings, the app put a message in the screen "Time to take your medicine. Please pick the pillbox and take a photo".

If he doesn't take the photo, make the app sound and show the message again after 2 minutes. After a few tries, send a message to some relative that is the guardian.

It will need some calibration to recognize the pillbox.

* After the photo of the pillbox, show a message: "Great. Today is Monday. Open the Monday slot and take another photo".

Repeat if there is no photo, and send a message to the guardian after some time. I'm not sure if in case of failure it is better to go to the previos step or not.

* After the photo of the open pillbox, show a message: "Take your medicine and then and take another photo"

It will need some calibration to distinguish the pills and the empty slot.

* After the photo of the empty pillbox, show a message: "Close the pillbox and store it. Great. See you tomorrow."

Something like this will need a lot of testing and perhaps FDA approval, but it doesn't look impossible.

(Perhaps it is easier to start with contraceptives pills, that have younger users that are more use to apps and don't have memory problems.)

Most pharmacies will prepare his meds in day-packs, some times more than one, that he takes at the A.M./P.M. etc. There is a fee for this, but they are setup for it and it should be manageable. That means he only has to deal with 1 or 2 events daily instead of opening many vials and taking out one pill and putting it into a pill holder that he will take. As it is the reminder now tells him to go to his meds and assemble his daily regimen of morning pills - this is time consuming. With aggregated pills it is easier. here is one, there are many https://www.pillpack.com/ Still not fool proof, he must be well watched. There are some pill mangers that will phone you of he misses his pills?

Carezone has a app that might be helpful, but what seems to work best for my parents is to have them get a physical system in place with those full week pill organizer boxes. https://carezone.com/home

For older people, there's nothing better than face to face interaction and someone to guide them through things. You could consider hiring a caregiver to stop by every morning for 30 min.

Another option would be to call him every time he needs to take his pills and talk him through it. If that works, where the reminder apps don't, you could gradually switch to having someone else, like a caregiver, call him.

Another possibility is he doesn't like taking the pills because of how they make him feel but he's afraid to tell anyone.

Could you attach a paper calendar and a pen to his fridge, and then put the pills into a pill box with a container for every day of the month?

He can check off each day on the paper calendar after he takes his pills.

If his calendar gets out of sync with his pill box, it's easy to re-sync. There's no single database.

I assume that while he probably looks at his phone every day, he definitely looks at his fridge many times a day.

If you want to get really high tech, you could add a $20 Wyze came and hang it near his pill box so you can check up on him.

We tried the calendar to check off days for my son, and that didn't work. We'd check off days and then forget the pills, or give him the pills and not check the dates.

Pillbox with pills for every day of the week works better.

Maybe throw in a once-daily, low-tech alarm, and you have both the timely reminder and the unambiguous record.

You need something like what these folks are building: https://apothewell.com/

If you want to use some kind of automated reminder, you could put together something pretty quickly on AWS. Use a combination of step functions and lambdas to send texts via Twilio. I'm not sure of the pricing on Twilio but the AWS stuff will be free.

I would say use this in combination with a well labeled pill box would be a good solution.

I actually like the idea of using Twilio instead of an alarm. A phone call is more likely to get him to act on it rather than a reminder on the phone. Thanks!

Do you use the calendar? I always set reminders in my calendar. The reminders are synced to my phone so they show up both on my desktop and on my cell phone. It's also synced to my gmail so my Google calendar is also able to notify me.

When you set the calendar entry, set both the reminder and click the repeat to choose 'daily'

I got this for my wife:

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B004BRXI2U/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b...

It's pill box combined with an alarm clock.

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