Pills Ping

Welcome to Pills Ping! Our goal has been to make a handy and trustworthy medication reminder app. We hope it will serve you well! Below is a brief description of the app:

The app is organized around recurring activities such as breakfast, bedtime, etc.
In the schedule you specify the names of the recurring activities, what days they should occur, their time frames, and what medical intakes they involve.
In the timeline you can see your activities for today, for several past days, and for tomorrow. It is in this time line that you should confirm that you have taken your medication.
If you have not taken your medication by the end of an activity's time frame, Pills Ping will remind you. The alert signal will repeat until you take your medication or postpone it.
You can postpone an intake when you are reminded or in advance.

We recommend that you explore the app first, and then return to this text to see if you have missed any features.

The Schedule

Before you start using Pills Ping, you must tell the app when you should take your medication and what medication to take. This is done in the Schedule tab. See the image below and the text that follows.

schedule

Recurring Activities

Define as many activities as you like! Touch the plus button to create a new empty activity and then configure it as follows:

Each activity should have a short descriptive name, such as breakfast, dinner, bedtime, etc.

Tell Pills Ping what days the activity occurs (typically every day) and also its time frame. Pills Ping will allow you to confirm the activity at any time within this time frame, and if necessary, the app will remind you when it ends.

A typical activity recurs every day. But as indicated above, you may specify that it should only recur on certain days (e.g. specific days each week or month). This feature was introduced in version 3.30 after a request from a user in Sweden. The feature can actually be useful even if you take the same medication every day! For instance, maybe you want your breakfast activity to occur a little later in the morning during the weekends. To accomplish this, create two breakfast activities with different time frames and set one to recur Monday through Friday, and the other to recur Saturday and Sunday.

We refer to your medication as intakes. Use the plus button to add a new intake. Specify its name (e.g. Levaxin), a note (e.g. 100 µg), and whether it is mandatory or not (typically prescription medication should be mandatory and supplements not — we will explain the difference later).

You may specify a final day for an intake. This feature was introduced in version 3.30 after a request from a user in the US.

Single Reminders

You may also create single reminders (e.g. buy new medication, renew a prescription, or call the doctor). For each reminder you specify a date and an optional note. The reminder will be silent. It will show up on the timeline from the specified date and remain there until you confirm it (the confirmation is done in the schedule).

Remove and Reorganize Activities

If you stop taking a medication, you should remove it from the schedule. If you are familiar with other apps, you probably already know how to do this: first touch "Edit", then touch the red minus sign, touch "Delete", and finally touch "Done".

For each day, the timeline displays the activities in the same order as they are defined in the schedule. To change this order, touch "Edit" and then grab a "handle" and move it.

The Timeline

The timeline tab shows all medical activities for the past few weeks, as well as for today, tomorrow, and the day after.

timeline You may wonder why tomorrow's activities are shown. This is to make it possible to postpone them in advance. Read on!

Postpone

Each activity has a postpone button. Touch it to extend the activity's time frame and thus postpone the ping! Each touch postpones by 15 minutes — touch 4 times for an hour. You can postpone when you are pinged, or up to 2 days in advance.

The ability to postpone an activity when you are pinged (i.e. snooze) is a welcome feature when you are unable to take the medication right away! For example, let's say you have left home without bringing your medications. When the ping occurs, postpone it so that it recurs later when you are back home!

Since the timeline displays future activities, you can also postpone activities in advance. For example, let's say you are having trouble sleeping and you know that in a few hours the breakfast ping will wake you up. You can postpone that activity to get some additional sleep. You can also postpone an anticipated ping when visiting the cinema, etc.

To our knowledge, the postpone button is a unique feature that distinguishes Pills Ping from other reminder apps.

The Pings

The app will start pinging you at the end of an unconfirmed activity's time frame. In other words, when you have forgotten to take your pills! The ping is very short. There is no time to turn it off. Instead, you should take the medication and confirm the intake. If you do not confirm the intake, the ping will repeat, again and again and again... But to avoid irritating you, or those around you, the delay between repeating pings increases with each repetition.

We believe that a reliable medication reminder must have a short ping signal that can repeat forever, but to our knowledge, this feature is unique to Pills Ping.

Best Practice

Taking one's medication involves two problems that may seem ridiculous to people who do not have to medicate. First, one must remember to take the medication, and then one must remember that one has taken it!

Pills Ping's alert signal and timeline solve these problems.

But one question remains, and this must seem really ridiculous to those who don't take medication: After you've taken your medication, but before you've confirmed it, you may feel unsure about whether you took it or not. You clearly remember that you planned to take it, but did you? Maybe you remember that you did. But is the memory from today or yesterday? The solution is to use the following best practice (known as the three-way handshake):

Insert pill in mouth
Touch confirm
Swallow the pill

Mandatory/Optional

As mentioned before, an intake may be mandatory or optional.

If an intake is mandatory, you should always take it (or postpone it). If that is impossible (the pill box is empty and all pharmacies are closed, etc.) you must of course skip it.

When you skip a mandatory intake, Pills Ping will disable the take button. This is to encourage you to postpone rather than skip, if there is a chance that the medication can be taken later.

When you skip an optional intake, Pills Ping will not disable the take button. With optional intakes, you can change your mind.

Quick Scroll

If the timeline displays the wrong day, touch the timeline icon to quickly scroll down to today's activities.

Summing Up

Let us sum up by mentioning the features that, according to user feedback, distinguish Pills Ping from most other medication reminder apps:

An activity has a time frame.
An activity may include multiple medications.
The ability to postpone the ping when pinged or in advance.
The forever repeating pings.
The timeline that displays your medical history.

Feedback

If you have questions or suggestions, please let us know your thoughts about Pills Ping in an email. You can send the email från Pills Ping's settings tab.

Should You Rate?

Sometimes people rate apps on the App Store. In countries where we have received ratings, they are typically quite good (often 5 stars). But in most countries we have received few or no ratings. Since the App Store search function prioritizes apps with many ratings, a person searching for a medication reminder app will probably not even see Pills Ping in the search results. To make things worse, most people hesitate to download an app with almost no ratings.

You are an exception! Somehow you managed to find Pills Ping and decided to download it. Since you have downloaded the app, you are now one of the few people who are eligible to rate it!

Your rating is very important to us. But it is also important to people already using Pills Ping, since we will continue to improve the app as long as it is being downloaded from the App Store.

For the reasons mentioned above, we kindly ask you to rate Pills Ping. Maybe not right now, but after you have used the app for a few weeks. Here is a link to Pills Ping at App Store.

Recent Versions

Version 4.00. In 2023, Apple removed Pills Ping from the App Store because we had neglected to update it for a while. Now it's back! The app has been completely rewritten using SwiftUI (a design language from Apple). We've also added subscriptions, but the subscription fee is low and those who purchased the app before version 4.0 do not need to subscribe. A new feature is one-time reminders.

Version 3.30. Introducing "What days?" and "Medication ends". These two new features were suggested by users from Sweden and the US respectively. New icon and graphics.

Version 3.15. Improving the auto scroll function. New App Icon.

Version 3.10. Small fix that makes the app scroll down to today's activities when it is opened, and another fix that improves the postpone feature.

Version 3.05. Small fixes.

Version 3.00. The entire codebase has been rewritten. We adopted Apple's Core Data technology to store your data on your device. We introduced optional medical intakes (this was suggested by a user — thank you!). The user interface received a facelift.

Version 2.10. Fixed a problem that made it impossible to check a medication as taken from the reminder menu.

Version 2.05. Bug fix: incorrect dates were displayed in some time zones. The timeline button now lets you quickly scroll to today's activities.

Version 2.00. A medical activity may now include multiple medical intakes (this was suggested by a user — thank you!). For instance, you can define a "breakfast activity" that includes several medications. There will be one common reminder for this activity, but when you take your medication, you have to confirm each intake separately.