An alarm app that reminds you to take your medications is getting rave reviews at the Microsoft store.
But getting 4.4 stars from users of Pillbox isn't what motivates Coquitlam's Daniel Paulino, who created the app in the summer while finishing his studies at Simon Fraser University.
The recent PInetree secondary grad had an even more important critic: his mom.
Suffering from infection due to lupus, an autoimmune disease, Dulce Paulino needed to take up to 10 medicines a day, and remembering to take them all at different times was proving difficult.
"I was looking for something to do that was challenging," Daniel Paulino said, "and she said, 'You should build me an app to help me take my pills.'"
It was a labour of love created on his laptop.
MAKE IT SIMPLE
"I knew I had to make it simple," Paulino recalled, and so he strove to make the app as intuitive as possible, reducing the number of "touches" to perform various tasks, with the result being an app that tracks the type of medicine, the dosage and the time, and plays an alarm that gets louder if the pill isn't taken.
"The idea is very simple: something my mom would use. She felt special [saying] 'It's an app built for me.'"
After testing, Paulino installed it on his mom's phone. It came in especially handy for a trip to the emergency room, when health officials requested a list of medicines.
"She whips out her phone and said, 'My son made an app.'"
Paulino graduated from SFU in October with a molecular biology major and a minor in computer science, a subject he grew passionate about over the past few years as he was paying his way through school working at the Pinetree community centre.
Originally thinking he would be a doctor, Paulino is now looking for a job in bioinformatics, which is the science of collecting and analyzing complex biological data.
1,000 DOWNLOADS
Now though, the Pillbox app is occupying his time while he applies for work. He recently sought help from coders around the world and the app is now available in German, Spanish, Russian, Dutch and Romanian.
In two months since it went public, it has been downloaded nearly 1,000 times, netting Paulino about $100. Better still, many people have reached out to him in thanks. People are using it to time medicines for various reasons, including someone dealing with a complex kidney transplant, and one person is using Pillbox to dose his sick pet.
"I built it for the use of my mom but people are saying they are using it to help their loved ones. That's something I would never have thought of."
There is a bittersweet ending to this story, though. Dulce Paulino, a well-known volunteer with the Hoy-Scott Watershed Society, passed away in October shortly after her son graduated from SFU and just weeks after Pillbox was made available on the Microsoft store.
But her legacy lives on in the app and Paulino is grateful to have been able to create something so useful to so many people.
"It's not supposed to make lots of money. It's a fun side thing and it makes me feel productive."
• Pillbox works for Windows 10 phones and PCs, and will automatically sync medicines across all devices. Find it here.
