The WSJ profiles four of the best caregiver applications available for your smartphones that allow you to check for common allergies, track care, make appointments, and a host of other functions.
Best of all, some are available at no charge.
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Tell My Geo (Android, $9.95 per month per phone)
A personal-health-record app allows any health provider including emergency responders to access your medical history via your smartphone. Tell My Geo combines that function with a GPS locator that enables caregivers who also have the app loaded onto their smartphone to track a lost loved one.
Wayne Irving, chief executive of Iconosys Inc. and co-inventor of Tell My Geo, said he originally conceived the app for seniors exhibiting signs of early-stage Alzheimer’s disease. But the app could help people with autism, mental illness or other ailments that can cause confusion, such as diabetics with low-blood-sugar levels, Mr. Irving said. Another safety feature allows a person to call a loved one by touching a photo icon, rather than remembering a name.
2. Personal Caregiver (iPhone, free)
One of a growing subcategory of medical apps that track medications, Personal Caregiver has the added benefit of allowing you to schedule and track the medications of up to three people, including your own medications.
It also allows you to receive recall alerts from the Food and Drug Administration and more detailed medication information with a $9.99 premium edition.
3. Pain Care (iPhone/Android/soon available on BlackBerry, free)
Pain Care, which won a Project HealthDesign award from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the California HealthCare Foundation, translates the pain scale into an electronic journal where a patient can indicate pain levels by touching frowning or smiling faces, as well as location, duration, characteristics, mood and triggers. That data can then be shared instantly with a physician who can adjust medications and treatments accordingly.
4. iBiomed (iPhone/iPod Touch, free)
Kwame and Florence Iwegbue, a South Carolina doctor and his wife, developed this app to help them juggle the huge quantity of information and tasks involved in caring for their own special-needs children with autism, seizure disorder, asthma and allergies.
Features include a mobile treatment log book for prescriptions, supplements, therapies, diets, allergies and tests; a portable medical record; a searchable journal for such items as foods, side effects and reactions; treatment and prescription refill reminders; customizable graphs; and the ability to ask advice and share stories with other caregivers through an online forum.
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