12/31/11
On New Year's Eve 2012 my son was curled up on the bathroom floor in pain. Over the next few days the doctor said to "watch him" and we were handed a range of medications. I'm a good note taker, but it's still hard at 2am to note he woke with a fever, or that it broke by dawn. And did my wife give him the 5am pill? I didn't want to wake her but I really needed to know before the next one.
Anyway, I wished I had a simple app on my phone for it. I made MedChart. Me and my friend Krishna spent a few months on it — him building and me designing and trying to figure out a business model for the effort. It was in the App Store for a year but never made much money, and I moved on to work at Adobe Research… but I continued to use it and was glad to have had it for those years. I was bummed when enough new versions of iPhone had come out that it got buried.
The original MedChart, 2012.
Cut to this morning at 4am.
I've been playing with the new AI tools for a few weeks seeing what I could do. I woke up and wondered if I could make myself a pet health tracker worth using. By 8am I was done.
I'll spend some time tweaking it up and making it more fun, but this is pretty much it. No ads. Nothing social. Not making medical decisions. Just a very simple, specialized note taker for home. You just need to remember to pull it out when you're feeling a symptom of something.
Anyway. It's flexible. 101 household uses.
— M.H. Rubin, dad