At the end of March I had shoulder surgery to repair a fifty percent tear of my rotator cuff, a SLAP tear of my labrum, as well as cartilage damage which I endured in a racquetball accident. The recovery has been very painful and I wrote my first blog post on Medium that discusses it. I’ve had several surgeries in the past and the pain wasn’t too bad. I was able to abstain from taking pain medicine quickly into my recovery. This surgery was different and its required me to take medicine daily even continuing into today 8 weeks after the surgery.
I do not like having to take the pain pills and I soon realized that I needed to be smart about tracking my consumption of them as trying to use my memory wasn’t a good method both because of the pill effects, as well as the fact that I haven’t been sleeping well. I figured there had to be an app that would allow me to track this properly on my phone. So I did research and read up on quite a few of them. I determined that the one that best met my needs was Dosecast available for Android and iOS. It offered the ability to manually add doses I took as needed and even had the ability to export my data (in the $3.99 premium edition I bought), always a big plus as a self tracker. The app’s UI wasn’t very polished but it got the job done.
Then early this week I checked again for posts that rounded up other apps to share in this post and discovered the Medisafe Meds and Pills Reminder app available for both Android and iOS. It looked to have similar features to Dosecast but had a gorgeous UI. After using both simultaneously Medisafe was much better in every way and was free. I’ve now switched over to it. One of the biggest advantages was that you could change the dosage amount each time you recorded taking pills. Also the date /time UI for adding past dosages was much easier to use. The daily visual pill history in quadrants is much easier to scan than the list based version used by Dosecast. Lastly the Medisafe export is done as an Excel file whereas Dosecast outputs an html file. Here’s a review by TheNextWeb of Medisafe if you’re interested as well.
Here’s another two medicine tracking review roundups as well that I found
“There’s an App for That!” A Review of Medication Reminders
10 iPhone Apps (some are for Android too) to Help Manage Medications
Very intresting article. Of course, now there are more such apps. I also searched for a pill reminder and decided to download https://www.appotek.com/. It also let you? doctor track your treatment.