Use cases for MedTimer

Find here some common use cases and how MedTimer should be setup to fulfill them properly.

Birth control pills

If you are using birth control pills that require one week per cycle where no doses are required, cyclic reminders in MedTimer can be setup to support that scheme.

Create a medicine and one reminder, there go to Advanced settings. In the Cyclic reminders section, select the day when you would take the first pill in First cycle start (can be both a future or a past date, the cycle will be calculated only based on that date and reminders would also be active before that date). Now enter the number of days you have to take a pill (usually in Active days. Finally, enter the number of days you are skipping the dose (usually 7) in Pause days.

Should your cycle change, adjust the First cycle start to the new first pill's date.

Tapering off a medicine

When tapering of a medicine, you would usually reduce the amount taken after a certain period. While it is possible to manually change the amount, it is also possible to setup the scheme for tapering of in advance.

For this, create one reminder per desired amount and set them active only in a certain time period in the Advanced settings. If you set these periods adjacent to each other, only one reminder with a given amount will be active at a time.

Reminder every n weeks

If you have a reminder that should only notify every n weeks or days, you can use Cyclic reminders. Go to Advanced settings and set First cycle start to one of the dates when the reminder should notify. Set Active days to 1 (because you only want one reminder at that certain day) and set Pause days to the number of days between two reminders. So if you want a bi-weekly reminder, Pause days should be set to 13 (14 days - 1 day).

Note that weekly reminders can be setup much more easily by selecting the weekdays using the Remind on button in the Advanced settings.

Disable a medicine

To quickly disable a medicine completely, select the medicine from the Medicine screen, hit the options menu icon on the top right and select Deactivate all reminders. This way, all reminders will remain in the medicine with their configuration, but they will not create any notifications. They can be re-activated the same way.

Validate reminder settings

Especially when using cyclic reminders, it can be tricky to make sure that all reminders of a medicine are setup correctly and will trigger the desired notification behavior. To validate if the setup was correct, the calendar view of the medicine can be used. It is opened from the calendar icon in the Medicine screen.

On this screen, you can see both past and future doses of a medicine. Days where a reminder will be scheduled are marked with an underline. Select them to see the reminders that would notify on that date at the bottom. Swipe to change the month.

Different notification sounds

It is possible to set different sounds to the reminders of two classes of medicines: Default priority and high priority medicines. The priority can be changed in the Medicine screen.

Each priority has separate notification settings that can be accessed via the MedTimer settings screens using the Notification settings ... menu items in the Settings menu.

On the corresponding screen, you can configure the behavior of notifications in detail, turning notifications on and off, assigning different sounds and controlling notification behavior. Note that settings there have an effect on all medicines assigned to the corresponding category.

Modify events

Events can be modified after they have been marked taken or skipped. The Taken or Skipped status can be switched by selecting the corresponding buttons on the Overview screen. Furthermore, details of the reminder can be changed as well by swiping the event to the right. The event's name, the dosage and the reminded time can be edited. For additional doses, also the date can be modified.

Additional dose with preset amount

On the Overview screen, the Log additional dose screen asks to select the medicine and the dosage to create an additional event. If you have a reoccurring dose with a fixed amount, you can add this dose to the corresponding medicine and set it to Inactive. Inactive reminders will show up in the medicine selection screen when creating an additional dose with their amount in brackets. Select these entries to skip entering the amount manually.

Export medication history

With MedTimer, it is possible to export the history of past doses either for your own reference or to show to medical staff. MedTimer supports two different formats for medication history: CSV and PDF. The CSV export is suited to be opened in a spreadsheet editor for further processing, filtering and sorting and provides flexibility to handle the data. The PDF export generated a file with a table of all past events that can be used to forward it to medical staff directly.

To export the history, open the options menu from the Overview, Medicine or Analysis screen. Select Event data and choose the export format desired.

Further customization to snooze

If you need a more flexible approach to snoozing reminders like setting the snooze time individually per reminder, you can use the Android settings for snooze notifications (Settings > Notifications > Allow notification snoozing).

You can also set the snooze interval to Custom..., which allows you to enter the snooze interval for every snoozed reminder individually when it is snoozed.

More nagging, repeating reminders

Reminders can be automatically repeated after a certain delay for a specific number of times. This feature can be enabled via the settings menu via Repeat reminders.

Doses that shall be taken at a specific time after the previous dose (following doses)

If you have a medicine that requires a dose to be taken at a specific time after the previous dose, you can create a reminder to notify at a specific time after the previous dose was marked taken or skipped. This can be done in the Advanced settings of the medicine. Use the button Add reminder for following dose to add a reminder for the following dose. Set the dosage and the delay.

Following doses can overlap into the next day, but are constrained to a maximum delay of 24 hours. It is also possible to chain following doses by entering the Advanced settings of a following dose and adding another following dose from there.

This way, you can for example configure a medication where you always take the first dose at around 8:00, then another one every 4 hours later and then two more with a different interval. So you would set up the doses like this:

1. Reminder at 08:00
2. Reminder following 1. 4:00 later
3. Reminder following 2. 5:00 later
4. Reminder following 3. 6:00 later

Interval reminders

In contrast to following doses, interval reminders always keep a certain interval and are not dependent on time triggers. Use these if you need to keep an interval which is not bound to 24 hours (e.g. every 10 hours) or if it is really important that the interval between each doses stays exactly the same. For both use cases, the interval reminder can be configured. It can either start when the previous dose has been reminded, consequently keeping a fixed interval between reminders at all times. Or it can be configured to start when the previous dose was marked either taken or skipped, keeping a fixed interval between taken times.

Additionally, it is required to set a start time of the interval. This time will mark the first dose and is used to calculate subsequent doses. If the interval shall be changed, this interval start time should be set to the next reminder time.

If a reminder is deactivated and activated again, the interval start time will be set to the time of the reminder activation automatically.

Medicine stock tracking

MedTimer can track the stock of your medicine, reducing the amount of medicine for every dose that has been taken. To enter the stock settings, click the parcel icon in the medicine view. In the following screen, you can set the current amount, the out of stock reminder type and the reminder threshold. It is also possible to indicate a refill with a single click. The out of stock reminder can either be triggered the moment when the threshold is reached for the first time or every time a dose was taken and the remaining amount is below the threshold. When stock tracking is active, the remaining amount will also be shown in the medicine list and in every reminder of said medicine. If the amount is below threshold, a warning icon ⚠ will be shown.

The amount to be deducted comes from the amount indicated for the reminders. The amount can also contain text, MedTimer will search for the first number in the amount and use this (e.g. 75 mg or Take 1 pill will work fine).

Stock tracking for another person

If you want to keep track of the stock of another person who is not using your MedTimer app, you can setup notifications to be automatically marked as taken. This way, you will not receive a notification and the stock tracking will be automatically triggered. Once the configured threshold is reached, you will receive a notification.

To enable this for a reminder, go to Advanced settings, scroll to the bottom and enable the switch mark as taken.

Using MedTimer for several people

To keep track of medication for several people at the same time, the "tags" feature can be used. Each medication can be assigned to one or more of configurable tags. These tags are shown in the notifications, the overview and the medication list. Using the tag icon in the app title bar, you can filter certain tags to only show reminders and medication assigned to the selected tags.

Intervals during daytime

If a medication should be taken in specific intervals starting from a time in the morning until some time in the evening, windowed intervals can be used. Select this type of interval when creating a new reminder and define the start and end time of day and the interval.

Note that the interval can also be configured to either start when the dose was reminded (this way, the reminders will be equidistant) or when the reminder was marked taken.

Alarm reminders

If the reminders for a certain medicine shall be raised in the type of alarms (showing as full-screen with an alarm sound and vibration), configure the notification priority of a medicine to "High + Alarm". All reminders of this medicine now show as alarms when the phone is in sleep mode.