Taking My Pills on Time

[jesse_the_k]

My medication alarm system combines a very low tech device—a four chamber pill box—with my iPhone’s system alarms. I set a daily repeating alarm labelled with the pill chamber number.

The key innovation is that, instead of a built-in alarm, I use a song. Sometimes it takes me a while to reach my pillbox—the length of the song doesn’t let the task slip from my mind. (It also is less annoying than a repetitive ding dong!) If I don’t snooze the song, iOS repeats it at least three times — fifteen minutes of "Take your pills, already!"

I choose instrumental songs, so as not to impose my lyric tastes on random strangers. I switch to different songs every season, since I can become ear blind to the same tune after too many repetitions.

My pharmacy sold me this 85 cm x 35 cm x 25 cm4-chamber pillbox in rigid plastic. Each chamber has a hinged lid, labelled in braille. There’s a lock on the end that my arthritic fingers have no trouble releasing.

And of course there’s one more set of pills I have to take as I climb in to bed—that pillbox rests on my phone charger, which so far has been a foolproof reminder since I don’t want my baby brain to go unfed overnight.

What's your system like?

Comments

[azurelunatic]

I have a weekly case with one similar four-chamber case per day, which can fit several large pills in addition to lots of small ones. I also have a few seven-compartment boxes of various sizes: one for my bedtime pills, one for the OTC part of my daily pain regimen, one specially labeled one for my ADHD meds. Plus a small four-chamber box for the pills for various sorts of digestive difficulty, and a fairly old small prescription bottle that I decant one day's worth of prescription pain pills into at a time, or a few more days if I'll be on the road.

The weekly case gets pills divided into: before/with breakfast; after breakfast & very after-breakfast; before/with dinner; and finally after dinner. I fill it out of a stack of AM/PM weekly cases that I keep in my desk drawer and load once every month or three. (I write the dates on those cases in grease pencil, so I can make alterations for upcoming appointments if necessary, like taking out the baby aspirin before anything that involves an incision.)

On my phone I use the Medisafe app, which I have programmed to ask me "Do you know where your pillbox is?" and make a pill-rattling noise at me. The prompts repeat every 15 minutes for 10 attempts, until I mark the thing taken or skipped.

It lets me mark a med as discontinued and will stop reminding me until I mark it as active again, which is good for the meds that I use for chemo side effects. It also lets me log doses of various meds that I don't take on any particular schedule. It lets me define custom meds as well as things it has in its database; I have "morning pills 1", "morning pills 2" and so forth for certain groups of meds that don't need separate enumeration, which I also like for privacy reasons. It also reminds me about my physical therapy.

I might possibly be back to a meds point where I could go back to a few alarms, but I like having the confirmation that yes, I did mark such and such a med as taken at such and such a time.

[jesse_the_k]

What a thorough arrangement! The Medisafe app sounds excellent — and it's now available on iOS.

https://medisafeapp.com

I like that it lets you make a timed check-in for symptoms as well as a diary. The talking alerts are a gas … the NY Mom, "take your meds! You don't write, you don't call, at least you should take your meds!" made me snort with delight. (And I'm no longer attending meetings where that would be entirely disruptive, although entirely disruptive was my brand when I went to meetings.)