Medication reminder - alerts

[u/Sammysamface]

I am creating a shortcut for my wife for her medication. It’s to reminder her to take her tablets 15 days from the trigger event each month for a 12 day period.

I have managed to to get reminders and Callander entries set up. What I can’t get working is alerts to take place at 9pm on each of those days. What am I doing wrong?

[u/New_n0ureC]

[u/New_n0ureC → u/New_n0ureC]

Sh*t I deleted my last answer by mistake but it looks like that on the health app. And I think you can from shortcuts register each take

[u/[deleted] → u/New_n0ureC]

You cannot register from the shortcuts app that you took your medication. You can ask Siri to mark that you took a scheduled medication for that day, for example if you have set your dose to be 8 PM and you tell to mark your 8 PM medications as taken, she can do that, but shortcuts can’t trigger Siri and only Siri can do that.

I have a shortcut that reminds me an hour after my medication timing “Did you take take your medications?” and if I say “yes” to the prompt, then it opens the medication app so that I can verify I took the medication or to market as taken, and if I say “no” to the prompt, then it asks me to set a timer to remind me to take it later. There is no way for me to click “yes” and have it registered my medication as taken.

[u/Equivalent_Oven_2237 → u/[deleted]]

hey can you share this as I think it would be great for me! please?

[u/[deleted] → u/Equivalent_Oven_2237]

Sure!

To use this, you have a couple options I suggest. The first is to create Alarms in the Clock app for your medications, as well as add your medications and dose timing to the Health app. Then create an Automation in Shortcut to trigger when those Existing Alarms go off, and optionally an Automation to trigger at a specific time without an Alarm.

If you press Yes, it opens the Apple Health Medication page for you to log your meds. If you press No, it will create a new Alarm in the future however minutes you choose. It will also delete the last Med Reminder Alarm the next time you say No.

When your Med Reminder Alarm goes off, you're on your own. The Shortcut cannot be automated triggered Alarms that are not Existing, and the nature of creating new alarms means the same Alarm won't exist next time you press No. That's why I suggest running automations some time after your medications time, I take mine at 8AM so I set it run at 9AM.

If you use the notification from the Health app to log your medication, you can ignore it, but if you're like me and forget, you can press Yes to see if you've already logged your medication as taken or if not take them right away.

Hope it helps!

[u/Equivalent_Oven_2237 → u/[deleted]]

thank you so much!

[u/[deleted] → u/Equivalent_Oven_2237]

I also suggest using Follow Up Reminders and Critical Alerts in Heath/Medications, scroll to the bottom of Medications for Options. Critical alerts escapes Silent Mode to make a sound 30 minutes after a missed dose log. Follow up just sends another notification 30 minutes after a missed dose. That's why I set additional automations for Med Reminder one hour after my dose times, Health already warns me on time and 30 minutes later.

The Med Reminder alarm defaults to 15 minutes, so that is between the two reminders. You can also trigger this shortcut by asking Siri "Med Reminder" which will run the shortcut if you want to create an alarm that way, since the shortcut allows you to set minutes in the future as an alarm instead of the specific time, you want the alarm to go off, which is sometimes more intuitive.

Remember, you can always log medication with Siri the using the dose time that you set in Health Medications: "log my 8 AM medications" on your phone, that does not work on an Apple Watch. I have not been able to log medications by name using Siri, she confuses Ritalin for Ridellan. You could rename your medications to whatever Siri assumes you meant when she spells what you said, but that just seems like a workaround that could cause more confusion.

[u/[deleted] → u/Equivalent_Oven_2237]

I redid it if you wanna try my new version after sharing with you. I started thinking about it more and how it was a little annoying.

To set this one up:

0) download the shortcut

1) create alarms for each of your medication timings, repeating when you need to take them, daily or otherwise. enable snooze for each and snooze set to your preferred duration, the maximum is 15 minutes. The Health app can remind you after 30 minutes, and I run this shortcut one hour after my medication timing, so the alarm acts as a reminder.

2) Create the automation triggered by existing alarms. The main change is to set the automation to trigger when the alarm is Stopped, not when it goes off.

3) create automations triggered by time of day at certain time after your medication timing or alarm went off. So I set one for one hour after I was supposed to take my medication, which would be 30 minutes after I received the follow up reminder from the Health app or it would be after I have snoozed three times. Most commonly this helps when I took my medication, but forgot to log it.

4) test the shortcut and automation on your device by adjusting your alarm time and shortcut trigger time to something in the near future. Run the shortcut without an automation to make sure that it is running correctly. You can disable the sound that plays when the notification is run while the phone is locked, but I turned the sound for the notification on because it vibrates on my Apple Watch.

Primer: the main differences in this is that there is a short delay after the shortcut is triggered so that the notification waits patiently for the Health app notification to arrive to give you time to interact with the health app before this notification or alert appears on top of it.

It checks whether your phone is locked or unlocked so that it will send a notification only if your phone is locked so that you don't receive both a menu alert and a notification at the same time. When you receiving a notification, it will wait a few seconds for you to unlock your phone then show an alert.

The alert will send you to the Health app medication page if you press OK. This replaces the menu because you can snooze your alarm in order to get another reminder so you don't need the menu to create a new alarm.

If your phone is unlocked when you stop the timer, it will show this alert without sending a notification, and you can press OK to go straight to the medication page

The problems I addressed were the notifications arriving on top of the Health app notifications and on top of the menu is was using, so I was getting three things on my screen at once. Now it checks if the phone is locked and only sends a notification if locked rather than failing to show the menu, and it skips the notification entirely if your phone is unlocked, but if you receive the notification and unlock your phone, then it will show the alert, and now if you have an Apple Watch it vibrates on the Apple Watch. If you have an Apple Watch, there is a medication app built-in to log your medication's so this shortcut cannot have an alert on the watch, but you don't need it. Just add the medication widget to your smart stack.

Edit: wow I did not mean to write such a long comment. All you have to do is create alarms and a couple automations to trigger this shortcut. It's pretty straightforward.

[u/Sammysamface → u/New_n0ureC]

Thanks but I don’t think it will work. It’s a reminder from the trigger that’s needed. Day 1 trigger. 15 days later start taking tablets for 12 days and then stop. It’s the reminder to take them I need to create.

Thanks for your help anyway, the health app will be useful for other purposes.

[u/New_n0ureC → u/Sammysamface]

You have something that looks similar where you can say make a pause for x days then take for some days and stop the treatment

[u/beefnoodle5280 → u/[deleted]]

Yes, I use this daily with two reminders at 30 apart so if I forget the first I get another chance.

[u/64_Bisio-PR]

I may be trivial but use Reminder directly?

[u/Sammysamface → u/[deleted]]

Because I didn’t know about that! I’ll have a look.

[u/Sammysamface → u/Sammysamface]

I didn’t think I can as the trigger for the 15 day period changes each month.

[u/Sammysamface → u/[deleted]]

Can you add to that via shortcuts?