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By: Jim Schrempp | Posted: July 27, 2016 | Updated: March 22, 2023
In a recent analysis of pill reminder apps, we had cause to examine 22 apps that helped in one way or another with medication management.
Read our analysis, and see the Apps we preferred for managing medication here.
There were a number of the 22 Apps which we felt fell short in various ways, and we have summarized these “less good” Apps below. We include short notes indicating what our analyst team thought were the problems with each of the Apps below.
Pill Reminder Apps that did not make our “best of breed” list
| Product name | Company | Notes from Evaluation |
|---|
| Apple Health | Apple | No medication management functions |
| Care4Today | Janssen Biotech, Inc. | Let us take a photo of our pills, but then horribly distorted it to fit a rectangular aspect ratio. Required us to sign up for an account. Home screen is cluttered with many little tiles of different colors; we found it too distracting for older adults. Has an interesting graphical display of dose history. Integrates with a nice web site. When we went to their corporate web site it had an 3 week old tweet featured that had some weird message, “sorry to heat that. Please can you both email your contact details… and we will call you.” We felt this shows a huge lack of attention at the corporate level. Their latest “news” was 9 months old. |
| Get My Rx | GetMyRx Inc. | An app to order refills. Tapping on their FAQ button took us to a web site page that did not exist. |
| Med Reminder | Wooden Apps Production | Application is very basic. No medication database. To track more than one medication you have to pay $3. |
| MediSafe | Vincent Thillerot | The app takes a very long time to start up. Application is in French. |
| My Meds | MyMeds, Inc. | To set up the required account the app uses it own data entry fields instead of the normal iOS method. This change can be confusing and was unnecessary. The password we initially entered was not complex enough but the app didn’t warn us until after we tapped OK. This kind of interaction can be very frustrating. The main screen is an arc of tiny icons that even sharp young eyes would have problems identifying; the icons did not have universal reference to their function. We found the process for adding medications to be confusing. They allow data entry via a web site, but we found that just as confusing. |
| My Pillbox | Ying Liu | No medication database. Ads at bottom of screen look like some function of the app, leading the user to tap on it incorrectly. We found the selection of medication appearance to be difficult to use as it often scrolled both up/down and left/right at the same time. It was uncomfortable to use this app. |
| Perfect Pill Reminder | Byoni | Searching the medication database requires picking both medication and sometimes manufacturer – makes for a lot of confusing choices. The selection is too sensitive to a touch, while navigating the long list we often accidentally made a selection. When we tried to add a photo from the camera roll it aborted. When we took a new photo of a pill the photo showed up rotated. As we tried to edit the photo all kinds of confusingly wrong things happened. Too buggy. |
| Pill Alert | LINKLINKS LTD | Too basic. No medication database. Just a reminder app. |
| Pill Cabinet | BartSoft | Very basic app for managing supplements. When we tapped to get support we found an HTTP Error 500. It costs $1 to add reminders. |
| Pill Control | Victor Manuel De Leon Chi | Too basic. No medication database. User is presented with a blank screen, there should be some help text to guide a non-technical user. |
| Pill Monitor | Maxwell Software | Does not offer medication lookup database. Has a place to tap for “side effects” but just brings up a blank text field for the user to fill in. |
| Pill Reminder | RV AppStudios LLC | App took a long time to start up, and then displayed an ad for other apps. When we tapped to dismiss the ad it took us to the app store anyway. Going back to the app brought another long, long delay. Does not offer a medication database. When we entered “amlodipine” it auto corrected to “amyloid pine”. While entering medications the app froze up several times. Every tap of the app made a little clinking noise that we found distracting. |
| Pill Reminder | Aplicativos Legais | Basic app. No database. Costs $2 to add photos of your pills. Ad supported. |
| Pill Reminder | Bahtiyar Polat | Too basic. Just a calendar for adding reminders. |
| Pill Reminder All In One | Sergio Licea | Uses the FDA drug database which gave a number of confusing choices. Nice dose history export report. Access to the iPhone camera was clumsy – the app asked us to go to the Settings app instead of using the standard escalation of privilege pop-up. Free version is limited to two reminders. Links to the Aida Organizer |
| RxmindMe | Walgreens | Provides medication database lookup, but the results are not filtered appropriately for the search, leading to confusing results. The method for setting up a reminder felt clumsy; each reminder is like a calendar entry and you add medications to it. As we worked the application option screens would fly into place and then leave when dismissed – we found this visually distracting. Each reminder had to have a “name” which we didn’t understand. Overall too confusing to continue. |
*Disclosure: The research and opinions in this article are those of the author, and may or may not reflect the official views of Tech-enhanced Life.
If you use the links on this website when you buy products we write about, we may earn commissions from qualifying purchases as an Amazon Associate or other affiliate program participant. This does not affect the price you pay. We use the (modest) income to help fund our research.
In some cases, when we evaluate products and services, we ask the vendor to loan us the products we review (so we don’t need to buy them). Beyond the above, Tech-enhanced Life has no financial interest in any products or services discussed here, and this article is not sponsored by the vendor or any third party. See How we Fund our Work.
Author
Jim Schrempp
A software engineer by training, I worked at Hewlett Packard for 19 years – back when it was a great company. In 1999 I left HP to co-found Audible Magic, a media identification company. In 2016 I retired. Now I spend my time working on problems that interest me, like applying technology to the issues of aging. I was co-host of a MeetUp on Aging in Place that started in 2014 and ran for two years. I’m a technology volunteer with The Villages of San Mateo County. I have created several open source projects, enjoy reading and cooking – especially modernist cuisine. We travel and spend much time with our friends. In my spare time I make little IoT devices. I spend a tremendous amount of time and energy as a volunteer at Maker Nexus, a non-profit makerspace in Sunnyvale, California. If you’re in the area you should stop by for a tour – the place is fantastic.
