warrimoo
Every family has a name for its elders. Nan and Pop. The oldies. In the family that started this project, they’re the Babs, and the name stuck so hard it ended up on the app icon.
Treat the Babs is the strange sibling in our lineup: a medication reminder built for one or two elderly people and the family orbiting around them. Same studio that makes a pet app. I’m aware of how that sounds, and the pairing is less odd than it looks.
I spend my days helping people manage medication schedules for patients who can’t manage their own. That’s the whole job of a vet, dosing-wise. And for years I’ve watched the same people who keep Bella’s worming chart on the fridge quietly running a second, heavier chart for a parent. Warfarin on the magnetic whiteboard. A dosette box someone fills on Sundays. A daughter ringing at 7pm, phrased as a chat but really an audit: did you take the evening ones?
The pet problem and the parent problem are the same problem. One of them just has higher stakes and more guilt attached.
So Treat the Babs takes what worked in TreatMyPet2 and re-cuts it for older eyes and busier families. The text is big. The buttons are big. Today is one calm list: morning tablets, evening tablets, tick, done. If a dose slips past, the app offers a gentle “catch up on today” rather than a red badge of shame. Blood pressure, weight, mood, sleep and pain can be logged with big friendly numbers, and it all rolls into a tidy report you can hand the GP instead of narrating the last three months from memory.
The part I care most about is the sharing. If the Babs agree to it, and only then, family members see the same list from their own phones. The daughter in Sydney watches the morning ticks appear and doesn’t have to make the audit phone call. That call can go back to being an actual chat.
Two design details I’ll defend to the death. The brand colour is the purple used for dementia awareness, on purpose. And when the app starts, it says hello properly. The splash screen reads “Hey Babs, nice day?” because software aimed at older people tends to address them like a hospital form, and I think that’s a choice, not a law.
The usual Warrimoo rules apply: works offline, no account required, no ads, no analytics, and nothing leaves the phone unless the family switches sharing on. It’s an organiser, not a medical device, and it will never pretend otherwise.
It’s in development now alongside everything else on the workbench. If you’re currently the person filling the Sunday dosette box, I’d genuinely love to hear what would help: appdev@warrimoo.net.