Remy: Designing Medication Tracking for Real-World Behavior
Remy is a mobile app that helps patients track their medications when recovering at home after a hospital stay. The app is built to handle the unpredictable nature of daily life while still giving doctors the accurate tracking data they need.
2023 - 2026
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Excelar / Bridge Health Solutions
The challenge: the gap between the plan and real life
Most health apps expect a perfect world where a patient takes the exact right dose at the exact right minute. But at home, routines break down. People sleep in, get interrupted by family, or need to change their dose based on how they are feeling that day.
When a tracking app is too rigid, two things happen:
Extra steps
Users have to fight the screens just to log a small change, like manually correcting a time or digging through menus to edit an amount.
Inaccurate data
If logging a mistake is too annoying, people just skip it entirely or log it incorrectly just to clear the reminder. This leaves doctors with a misleading picture of the patient's recovery.
Mapping the real-world exceptions
The layout needed to account for the two biggest areas where strict medical plans clash with normal home routines, making sure the interface could adapt easily:
What the plan expects:
Perfect timing
Taking a pill at a specific, set time.
Fixed doses
Taking the exact same amount every day.
What actually happens:
Delays
Taking a pill hours late because the morning routine got disrupted.
Changes
Taking a half dose or a modified amount based on live symptoms.
How the screen needs to adapt:
Smart statuses
The interface uses the recorded time to instantly categorize the entry as "delayed" instead of "missed," updating the daily view without requiring the user to explain the gap.
Inline adjustments
Adjustment buttons sit right on the main card instead of being hidden inside an advanced menu.
The solution: handling changes right on the main screen
Instead of making separate, complicated paths for "late" or "changed" entries, the app uses a single row that handles tweaks right where the user already is.
Handling late entries without extra steps
When a user logs a medicine past its due time, the app doesn't show an error state or force them to scroll through a clock widget to change the time. Tapping the main button simply saves the current timestamp. The app calculates the delay in the background for the medical team, keeping the user's job down to a single tap.
Changing doses without leaving the page
When a user logs a medicine past its due time, the app doesn't show an error state or force them to scroll through a clock widget to change the time. Tapping the main button simply saves the current timestamp. The app calculates the delay in the background for the medical team, keeping the user's job down to a single tap.
Better data through simpler actions
Because logging a variation takes only a couple of seconds, patients are much more likely to keep up with it. Doctors get a realistic view of how the recovery is going, instead of a timeline full of blank, skipped days.
The result: designing for future growth
Moving fast often leads to messy design choices that have to be fixed later, but planning for real-world exceptions prevented that here. Because the core tracking screen was built to handle delays and dose variations natively, the system didn't require a massive, costly redesign a few months down the road as the patient base grew.
