It started with my dad

My dad is 58 years old, has high sugar and diabetes and recently has his left leg amputated. He has a lot of medicines to take, and as he grows older, it becomes more challenging for him to keep track of everything. Different drugs have different instructions which sometimes vary considerably, and there are few things in life that you can’t simply replace.

We were struggling to come up with a system to remind him about all of his medications, and there was nobody whose “job” it was to keep doing that!

I have a full-time job, and my mother is busy most of the day.

We could remind him every now and then, but it’s not always convenient, we’re distracted, or we assume the other person has already reminded him.

That’s when the idea for Pill Buddy was born, a simple app to hold all of his drugs, keep track of when they need to be taken, remind him about them, and let us know when they’ve been taken. It was supposed to be my first serious project to learn Jetpack Compose, and had a strict rule of absolutely no AI.

It didn’t take long for me to realize that my initial idea was, in fact, not simple at all. Not only did I have to store pills with their names and reminder time, but I also had to account for schedules, frequencies, dates, doses, updates, missed pills, and a variety of other factors that appeared as soon as I started developing the app. It was one thing to set a reminder, but how would I keep track of what pills were supposed to be taken, what pills were taken, and what pills needed to be taken next, what happens if the pills run out of stock and most importantly how to make it user friendly mostly for older people?