There are dozens of Reminder apps for iOS, but Pillboxie is a specific one. As the name suggests, it remind you when to take your medicine. But it doesn’t just have a text reminder with an audio alert, it also catalogs all your medicine, past and present with text and picture. If you’re someone who takes more than one medication at different times, it can be very helpful. My son is recently out of the hospital and on IV antibiotics, creams, drops, pills, and a mouth rinse at home. This app has come in handy for remembering all the medicine.
Pillboxie can watch over the medication for everyone in your family. You can set a name or nickname for each different person, and also a different reminder tone for Notifications. Additionally, you can email a listing of your medications. Every time we go to a different doctor, they ask what medicine my son is on. I can email this to myself to easily read it off, or open the app itself. I have the app on my iPad, but I could also download it to my iPhone and just open the app to read off the medicine to the doctors.
When you add in your medications, you aren’t just listing them by name. You can identify them by type, shape, and color. They aren’t all pills. Sometimes they are drops, liquids, or inhalers. Creams seemed to be the one type that was missing, so when I added a cream, I just identified it as a liquid. When you’re taking many, it can be easy to mix them up. My son takes two different pills, one antibiotic and one for pain, so this helps identify which is which. One of them is an IV drip, so I took a picture of it with the app itself and used that as the visual identifier.
Along with knowing which medicine they are, you also need to know when they need to be taken. Instead of just typing in a time, Pillboxie has you “dropping” the pill or liquid or inhaler into a pillbox for a certain time. It’s exactly what you would expect for an iOS app, easy visual organization.
Other than just taking medications at the right time, there are also important things to know about them after they are taken, such as how they made you feel, if you took it at the right time or not, and if you took all of it that you were supposed to. Sometimes medicine help, but they don’t always. This serves as a good record for letting your doctor know when they work and when they don’t, and to remind you when you missed a dose, or when you weren’t able to take as much as you were supposed to. Additionally, there’s an area for notes. One great use for that is to add in your prescription number and the phone number of the pharmacy to make it even easier to phone in refills.
Once all your medicine are entered, you can visually see them all on the shelf, scrolling down to see them all if there are many, as there are with my son. Once you end a medication, you can change the time to being “Not currently taken.” It helps to keep it there on the shelf as a reminder of a past medication to tell doctors and hospitals. Notifications will kick in for just the medicine that you are currently on, giving you a reminder every time you are to take one. I just wish I had this app earlier. My son was on a medication schedule the first few weeks that was very difficult to remember, with some being every eight hours, and some being every twelve hours. I had to have a schedule written up on and taped to the wall. The Pillboxie app would have been so much more easier, as well as being more efficient. Pillboxie (App store)
