Feature
Medication reminders that arrive on time
A reminder that arrives an hour late is worse than no reminder, because it teaches people to ignore it. CareDuo treats the timing of a notification as the product, not as a detail.
Most medication apps get scheduling approximately right, and approximately is where adherence goes wrong. CareDuo puts the effort into the parts people actually notice.
Schedules that describe real routines
A medication in CareDuo carries its name, dose, an optional note about how to take it, and a schedule:
- Every day, at one or more times.
- Specific days of the week, such as a Monday, Wednesday and Friday tablet.
- Several times a day, each dose confirmed separately.
Each time is a wall-clock time in the person's own day. "08:00" is breakfast. It is not "every 24 hours from whenever you first set this up", which is how a morning tablet slowly migrates into the afternoon.
Why offline matters more than it sounds
A reminder that depends on a server reaching a phone is a reminder that fails in a basement, on a plane, in a rural house with one bar of signal, and every time a phone company has a bad afternoon.
CareDuo schedules reminders locally, through iOS. The phone already knows what is due and when; it does not need to be told. That is also why a confirmation works offline: the app records that the dose was taken at the moment of the tap and syncs the record later.
If you confirm a dose in a lift with no signal and the phone reconnects twenty minutes later, the record still says you took it twenty minutes ago. A caregiver reading the history is reading what happened, not when the network cooperated.
Daylight saving and travel
Twice a year, most medication reminders quietly shift by an hour. CareDuo's scheduling is tested against daylight saving transitions in both directions, the spring hour that does not exist and the autumn hour that happens twice, and against travelling between time zones.
The rule is simple to state and harder to implement than it looks: the dose belongs to the person's day. Fly from London to New York and the 08:00 tablet is still a breakfast tablet.
Due, late, missed
CareDuo distinguishes three things other apps tend to blur:
| State | What it means |
|---|---|
| Due | The dose time has arrived and nobody has acted yet. |
| Late | Past its grace period, still confirmable. It reads as missed, but the door is open. |
| Missed | The dose was never confirmed and the window has closed. |
That middle state is the one that matters. A dose you take forty minutes late is a dose you took. Software that slams the record shut the instant the clock passes is software people stop trusting, and then stop using.
Skipping is a legitimate answer
Sometimes a dose is deliberately not taken: the person feels unwell, a doctor said to pause, the bottle is empty. Skip records that as a decision rather than leaving a silence for a caregiver to interpret as a fall.
Skipped and missed are different states, shown differently, and counted differently.
What the other person sees
Every confirmation flows to the Care Circle straight away, so the caregiver's view of today changes as the day happens. Read more about caregiver alerts and what is recorded in history and adherence.
Common questions
Do reminders work without an internet connection?
Yes. Reminders are scheduled on the device using iOS local notifications, so they do not depend on a server, a signal or the app being open.
What happens when the clocks change?
Nothing changes for the person taking medication. A dose set for 08:00 arrives at 08:00 both before and after a daylight saving transition, because CareDuo schedules by local wall-clock time rather than by counting 24-hour intervals.
Can one medication have several doses a day?
Yes. A medication can have any number of times per day, and each one is a separate dose that is confirmed on its own.
Can I take a dose late?
Yes. A dose that is past due still shows as an outstanding dose you can confirm. Confirming it late records it as taken, at the time you tapped.