I have pills I need to take every day, 3 times a day with no end in sight. With so many things happening in my life, it has been a pain to keep up. I forget to take the pills. I forget when I last took the pills. And there is no urgency to taking the pills so there isn't the cold sweat that follows missing a blood pressure pill for example. Instead, every time I miss a pill, I get the distinct feeling that in 8 years from now, I will regret the pattern of pill missing I started on that day. So, I have been meaning to solve this problem but every existing solution I have had doesn't really work for me. ### Why not use regular alarms? The issue is that because of my life situation, I can't guarantee that I will be able to take a pill exactly when the alarm goes off. Sure I can hit snooze, but that will re-alarm after 8 minutes (on the iPhone). Also, if I accidentally dismiss it, that is, gone never to be seen again. ### How about the pills reminder for the health app? In classic Apple fashion, here is a great app that *almost* does what is necessary but provides no way to configure it. It does a follow up alarm on your pill time but it misses the following two key items 1. It will warn you twice and if you ignore that, oh well, bye bye to your pill but at least it remembers that you didn't take the pill at that time. 2. My pill schedule is less about the time of day (as I mentioned my schedule is unpredictable) but rather about the time between pills. It has no way to configure that. Thus, while a great idea, it doesn't address my two most important needs. ### So what did I end up doing? As a Software engineer, of course I tried to over-engineer the solution and instead of solving my problem, I ended up with a none-functional idea of an app called nag me that I didn't have time to actually make. In the meantime, I just kept missing pill after pill. Last night, I finally shoved my aspirations in the filing cabinet and instead went down realistic lane to make something using the easy tools I already have set up in my home lab. Essentially, what I needed were two things. 1. A job in the background that keeps checking if I have taken my pills. If I haven't, it keeps nagging me until I confirm I have done so. At that point, it goes to sleep until enough time has passed by and my next pill is due. 2. A way to notify/nag me. 3. A way for me to confirm that I have taken the pill so that it stops nagging me. Here are the components for each 1. [Nodered](https://nodered.org) - Allows me to build small basic apps on my already deployed server, taking care of both the basic `background job` part as well as the `pill confirmation` aspect. 2. [ntfy.sh](https://ntfy.sh) - Allows me to send reliable notifications to my devices without all the hassle and setup using a simple post request. So I ended up with the following setup, ![[Screenshot 2025-03-31 at 11.58.55 AM.png]] ![[Screenshot 2025-03-31 at 11.53.22 AM.png]] ![[Screenshot 2025-03-31 at 11.53.07 AM.png]] ![[Screenshot 2025-03-31 at 11.52.49 AM.png]] With this setup, I now get reliably nagged every 15 minutes until I confirm that I have taken a pill using the button embedded in the notification itself. ![[Screenshot 2025-04-26 at 10.43.44 AM.jpeg.png]] ![[89DBA7FB-679B-4031-ACEF-B90015E74D83_1_201_a.jpeg]] Just what I needed! A whole thing dedicated to nagging me until I do what it asks.