Meds Reminder

With my last post I talked about having to take eye drops every hour when I’m awake and then an ointment for while I’m asleep. I thought it would be hard remember to put them in and keep track if I had done it for this hour yet or not so I wanted to set reminders for myself.

On my phone I have almost all notifications turned off but on my Fitbit I do get notified of phone calls or text messages. Very rarely do I get either of those so typically when I do it is something important. Instead of setting an alarm for every hour of the day I thought I could finally try out the Twilio trial I had signed up for some time ago and send myself a text message every hour from 6am to 10pm. It was surprisingly easy to setup.

I’m most familiar with php and I’ve been really limiting my screen time so I can rest my eyes. I haven’t worn my glasses in days so it’s a strain to read without them and keeping them closed is when they feel the best.

Here’s the very simple setup I did, most all of it came directly from the Twilio documentation and all of it was done from the terminal.

1. Signup for a Twilio account.
2. Create a new site on an existing hosting account I have.
3. Downloaded the Twilio PHP SDK using Composer.
   I’m not really familiar with Composer but these are the commands I used:
   • Download Composer

     php -r "copy('https://getcomposer.org/installer', 'composer-setup.php');"
     php -r "if (hash_file('SHA384', 'composer-setup.php') === '544e09ee996cdf60ece3804abc52599c22b1f40f4323403c44d44fdfdd586475ca9813a858088ffbc1f233e9b180f061') { echo 'Installer verified'; } else { echo 'Installer corrupt'; unlink('composer-setup.php'); } echo PHP_EOL;"
     php composer-setup.php
     php -r "unlink('composer-setup.php');"
     

   • Download the SDK

     php composer.phar require twilio/sdk

4. Create a new php file with the following code

   <?php
   require_once 'vendor/autoload.php';
   $sid = "ACxxxxxx"; // Your Account SID from www.twilio.com/console
   $token = "xxxxxx"; // Your Auth Token from www.twilio.com/console
   
   $client = new Twilio\Rest\Client($sid, $token);
   $message = $client->messages->create(
     '+15555555555', // Send text from this number
     array(
       'from' => '+15555555555', // From a valid Twilio number
       'body' => 'Take your drops'
     )
   );
   
   print $message->sid;
   

5. Create a cronjob to run the hours you want and visit the webpage

   0 6-22 * * * wget -q --read-timeout=0.0 --waitretry=5 --tries=5 --background http://{url for file created above}

Now I get a text ever hour on the hour from 6am to 10pm and my FitBit notifies me that it’s time to put in the drops.