Medication Adherence Tracker with Caregiver View

The problem families face with long-term medication

Many people over sixty manage five or six prescriptions on different schedules: one tablet twice a day, one every eight hours, one on Mondays, one tapering over two weeks. Doses get missed, or taken twice because nobody remembers whether the morning one happened. Adult children, often living in another city or abroad, want to help without phoning every evening. Pill boxes and alarm clocks help, but they cannot tell a daughter in Dubai that her father's evening dose is an hour late.

What already exists and the gap

• Medisafe is a widely used medication reminder app with "Medfriend" caregiver alerts; its free plan has become more limited.
• MyTherapy is a free reminder and pill tracker with intake logging and health diaries.
• Phone alarms and pill organisers are what most families actually use.

Reviews of reminder apps repeatedly mention reminders that stop on some Android brands because of aggressive battery optimisation, interfaces that are hard for older users, and caregiver features locked behind a subscription. The gap is a simple, accessible app that reminds reliably on the budget Android phones older users actually have, supports Urdu as well as English, and makes the caregiver link a free, consent-based part of the design.

What you build

Two roles:

• Patient: adds medicines with schedules (or has a family member set them up), gets reminders, taps Taken, Snooze or Skip.
• Caregiver: joins by an invite from the patient, sees today's doses and history, and gets an alert if a dose is left unmarked.

Main flows: set up schedules, receive a reminder, mark it from the notification, view history, invite a caregiver, revoke access. Everything works offline for the patient; caregiver updates sync when the phone is online.

The technically interesting part

Reminders that actually fire. Modern mobile operating systems suspend background work, and a common student result is an app whose reminders stop after two days on a real device. Use exact alarms where the platform allows, reschedule after reboot and time changes, handle notification permission on newer Android versions, and guide users through battery optimisation exemptions for their brand. Measure delivery across several brands for a week and write up what you had to do. That report is a genuinely useful contribution.

Scheduling rules as data. Tapering doses, every-N-hours schedules and as-needed medicines break naive "time of day" models. Represent schedules as rules and generate concrete dose events from them, with unit tests for tricky cases such as daylight saving changes when travelling.

How to evaluate it

• Delivery reliability: percentage of reminders delivered within one minute over seven days on at least four Android phones from different brands, before and after your fixes.
• Accessibility: a TalkBack walkthrough of every screen, plus a checklist against Material accessibility guidance.
• Usability with older adults: 5 to 8 participants over 60 set up one medicine and respond to a reminder; record success, time and errors.
• Caregiver latency: time from a missed dose to caregiver alert in tests.

Suggested plan

1. Weeks 1 to 2: interview older adults and caregivers; collect real schedule patterns.
2. Weeks 3 to 5: schedule rules, dose event generation, local storage.
3. Weeks 6 to 8: notifications with actions, reboot handling, reliability testing on real phones.
4. Weeks 9 to 11: caregiver invite, sync, missed-dose alerts, revocation.
5. Weeks 12 to 15: accessibility pass, usability sessions, write-up.

Path to a product

Start with families: overseas children paying a small subscription for caregiver alerts on a parent's phone is a clear first customer, while the patient's reminders stay free. Pharmacies and home-care agencies are a second market, using the caregiver view for their clients under a per-patient fee. Keep data minimal and consent explicit; health data builds or destroys trust fast.

Scope warning

This is a reminder tool, not a medical device. It must not suggest doses, diagnose, or advise stopping a medication; say so in the app and in the report, and route anything clinical to a doctor or pharmacist. No prescription management, pharmacy ordering or clinical records.

Learn what you need on Sefism

• Mobile roadmap : Flutter, notifications and local storage.
• Mobile cheat sheet : app lifecycle and background limits.
• Android Developers: Develop for Android : exact alarms, notification permission and battery rules.
• Firebase Documentation : auth, Firestore and Cloud Messaging for the caregiver side.
• Material Design 3 : accessible components, touch targets and contrast.

Get help with this idea

This is a good beginner idea if you test on real phones and real older users rather than an emulator. Tauseef can help you tighten the scope, choose a stack your team can finish with, and design an evaluation your examiners will respect. If you are new here, create a free account first.

• Discuss this idea with a mentor
• Send a query to Tauseef
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