Product · In development
Lou
A medication and care notebook for your household — and health data that stays where it belongs, with you.
Caring for someone — a child, a parent, yourself — comes with a quiet, endless bookkeeping task: was the medication given, is the next dose safe yet, how has the pain been this week? Most apps that promise to help turn exactly this deeply personal data into a product to be monetised.
Lou takes the opposite approach: a calm notebook and reminder app for the people in your household — or, in single-user mode, just for you. You write down medications and their schedules, record doses as you give them (and the ones you deliberately skip), track readings like pain, mood, or blood pressure — and Lou remembers what was done and reminds you about what’s next. When it’s time for an appointment, it turns any date range into a one-page PDF summary a doctor can actually read.
Why Lou exists
When my daughter was born six weeks early, my wife and I had no help taking care of her. We kept a checklist so nothing got forgotten — did we feed her, do tummy time, give the vitamins, sterilise the bottles — too many data points. The checklist helped, but through the sleep deprivation that comes with a newborn, it was sometimes hard to remember what was already done and what was still left to do.
We got through it — she’s a healthy, almost-ten-year-old now. But I wanted other parents and caregivers looking after a loved one to have the tools we didn’t: a reliable way to keep track of what was done and what still needs doing. This app is the result, and it’s named in her honour — Lou is her middle name.
An honest tool
Lou is deliberately not medical advice, and it knows nothing about medicine. It never decides what dose to give or whether a medication is safe — everything it shows, including “ready”, countdowns, and progress rings, is simple arithmetic on the schedule you entered. It’s a memory aid for caregivers, not a substitute for a doctor, a pharmacist, or the medication label. Reminders are engineered around that honesty: the reminder at the due time always fires, follow-ups can be tuned from gentle to persistent, and health check-ins respect quiet hours while dose reminders are never delayed.
Status
Lou is in development for iPhone and iPad (iOS 17+). If you’d like to hear when it’s available, or you’re interested in early testing, get in touch below.
For the whole household — or just you
Track medications for everyone you care for — children, parents, yourself — grouped by person, each with their own schedule. Caring only for yourself? Single-user mode puts the household bookkeeping away until you need it.
A safe dosing rhythm
Set the minimum time between doses and a daily maximum per medication. A progress ring shows at a glance when the next dose is ready.
Doses counted over days, not just hours
For an as-needed medicine your doctor limits across a span — sumatriptan at, say, two doses in any seven days — Lou shows how many you have left and, once they're used, exactly when the next one is available. It only reports the count against the number you entered; it never blocks a dose or offers advice.
Skipping is data too
Winding down a strong medicine, or trying to take less of one? Record a deliberately skipped dose — in the app or straight from the reminder — and skips are counted and shown alongside doses, so you can see how the taper is actually going.
Health tracking, your way
Pain, mood, glucose, and blood pressure are built in, or define your own measurements — as-needed, on a schedule, or tied to a medication. Trend charts show how things develop.
One honest timeline
Every dose and reading lands in a single activity feed, so anyone in the household can see what was done and what still needs doing.
A summary you can hand over
Export any date range as a PDF for an appointment: doses, skips, and readings on a weekly timeline that makes patterns visible at a glance. For dose-limited medicines it sums doses per window, averages them over the range, and clearly marks anything over the limit — counts and facts only, never a grade.
Widgets and Lock Screen
The next dose and its countdown on your Home Screen and Lock Screen, so the most common question — is it time yet? — is answered without opening the app.
Reminders that don't give up
A reminder fires when a dose is due, with follow-ups if it goes unanswered — and you can record, skip, or snooze straight from the notification.
Private by design
Records live on your device — no account, no third-party trackers, nothing sold or mined for advertising. Built in Europe with GDPR as a design principle.
What's next
Coming soon
What I'm working towards for the first releases — the order can change based on what early testers ask for.
Planned
Refill tracking
Record how much of a medication you have left. Every dose counts down the supply, and a reminder arrives before you run out — not on the morning you already have.
Exploring
Apple Health
Read the readings you already record elsewhere, and write back the ones you record here — with the exchange staying on your device and switched off by default.
Interested in Lou?
Get in touch at ryan@fortibus-consulting.com — I'm happy to talk.