DoseTrack: Built for Parents and Grandparents - A Simple, Private Family Medication Tracker
What I Built Every day, many elderly parents and grandparents ask themselves the same worrying question: "Did I take my morning blood pressure pill half an hour ago, or did I just think about taking it?" When our loved ones take four, five, or more medicines every day for conditions like high blood pressure, diabetes, and heart health, it is very easy to make mistakes. A person might skip an…
DoseTrack is a medication tracker designed with the needs of parents and grandparents in mind. The app addresses the common issue of elderly individuals forgetting or doubling up on their daily medications, which can lead to serious health complications. For example, a person might skip an important pill due to fear or accidentally take it twice. Traditional phone alarms are often ineffective, as people tend to dismiss or snooze them while half-asleep, never actually taking their medication.
DoseTrack alleviates these concerns by employing wake-up math alarms. When it's time for a pill, the app plays a clear chime sound in the user's web browser. To silence the alarm, the user must solve two simple math questions, such as 14 + 7 or 5 x 6. This ensures that the person is fully awake and focused before taking their medicine, reducing the likelihood of errors caused by sleepiness or distraction.
The family can easily access DoseTrack from any device, such as a phone, tablet, or laptop. When a parent marks their morning medicine as taken, their status updates in real time for everyone else in the family. This removes the need for constant phone calls asking if the medications have been taken. Additionally, DoseTrack includes a feature for tracking daily blood pressure and blood sugar readings.
The app automatically displays the highest, lowest, and average numbers, along with clean graphs and can export a simple spreadsheet report for bringing to the doctor.
One family member can be designated as the caregiver, or Admin, who has the ability to update medicine schedules, change times, and assist the elderly user without locking them out of the app. All health records and medication lists are kept private, stored only on the user's own system and not shared with outside companies, advertisers, or third-party servers.
The source code for DoseTrack is publicly available on GitHub, allowing for open innovation and collaboration. The app was built using Python 3 and FastAPI for the server, HTML5 and CSS3 for a clean design, Vanilla JavaScript for interactive elements, and Web Audio API for generating audio chimes. The complete source code is accessible at the GitHub Repository: https://github.com/sarasinha1207/DoseTrack.
Open innovation and open-source software are particularly important for family health applications. By keeping DoseTrack open-source and storing data locally, family health information remains private and secure, avoiding the issue of commercial apps selling prescription information to advertisers. Furthermore, DoseTrack is free and accessible to everyone, offering a medication tracker without the need for expensive monthly subscriptions.
As healthcare technology evolves, open innovation ensures that reliable tools like DoseTrack remain available for free to families everywhere.
Written by urgent.news from Dev.to's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.
