#pilldrill

So. There’s a lot to discuss here.

As a starter, let me introduce my partner Ash! They are agender and use the singular they/them pronoun. We’re polyamorous, and I live with them and our other partner Steve.

Ash is a lot sicker and less mobile than I am, so I and the able-bodied Steve tag-team on helping them out. I got the PillDrill specifically for Ash, so I’m reviewing from the perspective of someone supporting a partner, and also based on the feedback they’ve given me.

Now that that’s out of the way, let’s dig in!

What is it?

PillDrill is a system meant to fully address medication management. It has a small “mission control” hub, 1, 2, 3, or more pill strips, scan tags you can put on your individual medication bottles, and a cute little mood cube you can use to quickly log how you’re feeling at any time.

The concept here is to use the hub to scan medications as you take them. The pill strip pods are scannable, and you can attach lettered tags to individual bottles with straps or adhesive. The hub can accept a scan of these or the mood cube, and can prompt you to make certain scans with beeps and flashes.

Tying all of this together is a little app that you and a caretaker, friend, or family member can download to keep track of everything. Since you won’t always be right in front of your hub, you can also log a dosage from the app by medication name, pill strip, or letter. The app will send you scheduled reminders if you like, and send an alert to someone if you are a specified number of hours late in taking them.

The app keeps track of when you log any medication, which is helpful if you need to space your dosages carefully. It keeps your history so you can easily look back and see your adherence to your schedule, or how often you’re using rescue medications.

What we liked

This system is feature-rich and pretty while still being modular and flexible. Don’t want reminders? Just log your meds when you take them! Don’t want to bring others in on your medication management? Don’t need to! Not really into scanning or the hub? Just buy the pill strips!

Ash and I did a lot of trial and error with the system, figuring out what did and didn’t work for them. In the end, they found that they like having the hub around by their nest on the couch, but mostly log doses on their phone. They don’t care about me or Steve being looped in on what they take, but I did find their mood notifications really handy and used their medication history/”med cabinet” in the app to make sure I filled their meds up correctly each week. They found medication reminders a bit too stressful (the hub beeps and flashes and their phone lights up), so we turned those off really quickly.

The pill strips are absolute keepers. They’re nice and easy for Ash to open despite painful joints, and—fitting in with the modular approach—each day’s pod pops out for easy carrying. Very handy. The pods are surprisingly spacious, too! Ash was worried their enormous host of dinner medications wouldn’t fit, but they (just barely) do.

Ash's pill strips are in the places they are mostly likely to take a certain dosage, so Steve and I find the individual pods extremely helpful when Ash asks us to fetch their meds from another floor of the house; there’s no worry of us moving an entire pill case to the wrong spot and forgetting to put it back. When they go out for a meal, they bring their pod along with ease (although this does mean there’s a weekly “where-did-you-leave-that-one-pod” moment).

As you may have gathered, I just love the pill strips as a concept, and think they really stand out on their own as an individual product. Do read on to the next section for some of my concerns, though.

The mood cube, too, is a really great addition to the system. The hub is a bit like a clock radio, so you could keep it by your bed or wherever you nest up during the day, and just scan the cube whenever you notice it. Ash doesn’t let on about how bad they’re feeling—mostly by habit, but also because they don’t emote unless they feel socially obligated to. The mood cube was so great, because I could get passive updates over the course of the day without bothering them with “how do you feel on a scale of 1-10″ or any other such silliness.

While we didn’t end up using the other features, I absolutely see how they could be useful for the right person! I love that the PillDrill seems to have been designed with different experiences in mind.

What we didn’t like

I actually have a pretty long laundry list of things we didn’t like in the PillDrill. They aren’t dealbreakers, but they do somewhat detract from the product as a whole.

The pill strips make me a bit uneasy for travel. I definitely would recommend them to someone who is mainly taking their meds at home, but a trade-off of easy-opening pods is that the closures aren’t very strong; if your pods were being jostled in your purse every day, you’d probably have a few spills. Ash was hesitant to try carrying them because of this, but the shortness of the trips they generally take with the pods seems to minimize the risk.

The strips also have nice magnetic straps you can pull over them to keep them in place when you travel, but I’m still not convinced they wouldn’t pop open in your luggage under the right circumstances.

Note: If you’re looking for a good on-to-go pill case, I highly recommend looking into the Sabi Folio, which I love and have been using for the last 2 years. Here’s a review I wrote a while back for Ethos Disability, if you’d like to learn more.

I also noticed that some pods stay in the strips better than others. They’re supposed to pop into the strip pretty securely, but we have a couple days that can’t quite stay in, which bugs me just from an aesthetic perspective. This is a production issue and could probably be fixed in future versions.

I think the app is where this product needs the most work.

There were a bunch of little things that bothered us, so I’ll just throw them in a little list:

There’s no way to assign doses to pill strips. This means that if you log a day’s pod, you’re not logging exactly what you took that day. This is a real miss, since folks will probably want to keep track of when they start and stop certain medications. The alternative is to log each medication one at a time, which is ridiculous when you take so many medications.

You can’t name pill strips. They just go by Strip 1, Strip 2, and so on. Kind of rough when you have a bunch of them.

Notification overload. When you take a bunch of meds all at once, you get this cascade of reminders. You can fix this by setting up a pill strip instead of individual meds, but the above two items make that a little less viable. A short-term fix would be to group those reminder notifications.

No mood-only notifications. I don’t care when Ash takes their meds—that’s their business—but I do want to know how they’re feeling. Unfortunately, I can only get these with “meds taken” notifications, so I experience a notification overload on my end, too.

Better mood gradation needed. Ash’s health has been ranging from “bad” to “awful” lately, and they’ve expressed a real desire for better gradation in that area; the data we’re collecting here isn’t so useful. I know cubes are useful and cute, but maybe PillDrill can take a cue from the dice used for tabletop RPGs.

No time stamp editing. Right now, you can’t edit the timestamps, meaning that if you forget to log your meds and try to do it later, it won’t show an accurate time. Ash takes a number of meds that restrict when they can eat before and after, so it’s pretty important that they keep track of when they were taken. They’ve been foggy enough that they might be able to remember they took something 15 minutes ago, but will forget that a few minutes after and not know when it’s safe to eat yet. This could be a big barrier for folks who use rescue meds they need to space out by a certain number of hours.

No way to export medication lists. This is pretty self-explanatory—it would be great to be able to share the contents of your “med cabinet” in the app with a doctor. As it is now, you’ll either need to take screenshots or keep a separate list. This makes the “comprehensive solution” feel a bit less comprehensive.

Symptom tracking would be pretty cool. We’re both hoping to see this in a later release of the app, as it’s the obvious next step.

Who will benefit from this system

Overall, it seems like this system was designed primarily for foggy stay-at-home folks with or without caretaker(s). It also seems like it would be great in an institutional setting, given the at-a-glance medication adherence features and ability for a caretaker to add multiple patients to their app.

Anyone with a bunch of different medication times will love the reminders, and folks who generally take their doses at home will love the pill strips to death.

Otherwise, it’s all about what you’re into!

Want one of your own?

Look no further! Head over to the PillDrill site to pick up the whole system, or just the beautiful pill strips.