CarerNote

In testing with one family — not in the app stores yet

One place for the medications, and what happened today.

When a family shares the care of one person, everything ends up in one person's head. CarerNote gets it out of there — into something the rest of the household can read without having to ask.

Free while it is being built. No account, no password, nothing to buy.

The problem it was built for

The same three questions, all day, every day.

  • “What is she actually on now?”
  • “Did anyone give her the eight o'clock one?”
  • “What did the doctor say last time?”

They get asked by the sibling who visits on weekends, by the paid carer who covers Thursdays, by the locum who has never met her, and at four in the afternoon by the person who already answered them at nine in the morning.

That person becomes the only working copy of the record. Everything runs through them, which means everything stops when they are asleep, at work, or finally taking a week off. CarerNote exists to make the household survive that week.

Medications

Photograph the label. Don't type it out.

Nobody transcribes a box of tablets correctly at the end of a long day, and the ones most worth getting right have the longest names. So you point the camera at the packaging and check what comes back.

The photograph stays. Months later, when someone asks whether it really said 500 milligrams, the answer is not a memory of typing it — it is the box.

A medication that has not been checked by a person is marked as such and is kept off anything you print. A reading nobody has confirmed is the camera's guess, not the household's record, and it should never reach a doctor looking like a fact.

Handover

The end-of-day message, already written.

At the end of a shift CarerNote assembles what is still due, what was given, and what anyone noted. You read it, add anything it could not know, and send.

It goes as plain text through whatever the household already uses — the group chat, a text message, email. Not a notification. Not an in-app inbox.

That matters more than it sounds. The carer who covers Thursdays does not need the app, an account, or a password to read a handover. Asking her to install something before she can receive one is the same barrier as asking her to sign up.

What actually arrives on her phone

Margaret Chen — handover, Monday, August 25 at 6:12 PM

STILL DUE
• Metformin 500 mg — 6:00 PM — OVERDUE

GIVEN TODAY
• Metformin 500 mg — 8:10 AM, Sarah

NOTES
• 9:05 AM (Priya) Slept through. Bit unsteady getting
  to the bathroom — worth mentioning Thursday.

FROM ME
Back tomorrow at 8. Her daughter is calling tonight.

— Recorded in CarerNote by family. Not a medical record.

The rest of it

Three things that only matter once you've needed them.

It works with no signal

A hospital corridor is exactly where you need to write something down and exactly where the reception dies. Everything saves to the phone first and catches up later — the app never waits for a network to let you in.

The answer sheet

Her doctor, her allergies, which hip it was, where the spare key is. The facts that get asked for under pressure, kept somewhere that isn't one person's memory.

The doctor-visit pack

Before an appointment, CarerNote pulls the confirmed medication list and the recent notes into one printable page — so the ten minutes get spent on the questions rather than on reconstructing the last three months.

Nobody has to make an account

There is no sign-up, no email, no password, no verification step. You open it and it works.

To let someone else in, you read them four digits. That is the whole mechanism — because a 78-year-old husband at the end of a long day will not create an account, and the richest thing in the record is what he knows.

Where it's up to

Being built in the open, by one family.

CarerNote is real software that works — the medication list, the shared log, invites, the handover, the answer sheet and the visit pack are all built and tested. It is being used by exactly one household: the one that needed it.

What that means for you today:

  1. It is not in the App Store or on Google Play yet. That is the next step.
  2. There is nothing to buy and no pricing to read. When there eventually is, it will not be sold inside the app.
  3. The record currently lives on the phone that wrote it. Back-up and restore is not built yet — worth knowing before you trust it with anything you cannot lose.