What is the best way to setup medicine reminders for my dad?

Does he have a pill box?

If not, get a transparent pillbox with compartments for every day of the week (you can also get them with separate compartments for morning / evening).

Then put it in a place that he will always see it (eg. kitchen table).

No need for an app, and it's easy to check if he already took his meds or not.

Apps or other things are kinda bad, because you can silence the alarm and then forget to take the meds, or he can accidentally take the meds twice.

If all the doses for the week are prepared ahead of time, these mistakes are not so easy to make.

Most pharmacies will prepare his meds in day-packs, some times more than one, that he takes at the A.M./P.M. etc. There is a fee for this, but they are setup for it and it should be manageable. That means he only has to deal with 1 or 2 events daily instead of opening many vials and taking out one pill and putting it into a pill holder that he will take. As it is the reminder now tells him to go to his meds and assemble his daily regimen of morning pills - this is time consuming. With aggregated pills it is easier. here is one, there are many https://www.pillpack.com/ Still not fool proof, he must be well watched. There are some pill mangers that will phone you of he misses his pills?

Carezone has a app that might be helpful, but what seems to work best for my parents is to have them get a physical system in place with those full week pill organizer boxes. https://carezone.com/home

For older people, there's nothing better than face to face interaction and someone to guide them through things. You could consider hiring a caregiver to stop by every morning for 30 min.

Another option would be to call him every time he needs to take his pills and talk him through it. If that works, where the reminder apps don't, you could gradually switch to having someone else, like a caregiver, call him.

Another possibility is he doesn't like taking the pills because of how they make him feel but he's afraid to tell anyone.

Could you attach a paper calendar and a pen to his fridge, and then put the pills into a pill box with a container for every day of the month?

He can check off each day on the paper calendar after he takes his pills.

If his calendar gets out of sync with his pill box, it's easy to re-sync. There's no single database.

I assume that while he probably looks at his phone every day, he definitely looks at his fridge many times a day.

If you want to get really high tech, you could add a $20 Wyze came and hang it near his pill box so you can check up on him.

You need something like what these folks are building: https://apothewell.com/

If you want to use some kind of automated reminder, you could put together something pretty quickly on AWS. Use a combination of step functions and lambdas to send texts via Twilio. I'm not sure of the pricing on Twilio but the AWS stuff will be free.

I would say use this in combination with a well labeled pill box would be a good solution.

Do you use the calendar? I always set reminders in my calendar. The reminders are synced to my phone so they show up both on my desktop and on my cell phone. It's also synced to my gmail so my Google calendar is also able to notify me.

When you set the calendar entry, set both the reminder and click the repeat to choose 'daily'

I got this for my wife:

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B004BRXI2U/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b...

It's pill box combined with an alarm clock.