The last few years has seen an explosion of companies catering to the specific needs of bariatric patients, with everything from protein supplements to food products to vitamins. One of my favorites is Bariatric Advantage, I use their multi vitamin and b12, and love their calcium chews.
Ok, so you can’t “take” your vitamins via a text message, but Bariatric Advantage recently started a new service called “icompli” where you can set up a schedule of your vitamins and they will send a text message to your phone to remind you to take them.
It’s pretty easy to set up, once you log in to the site, click on the My Account link, you just go to the new iCOMPLi tab. The screen you get looks kinda like this…
You’ll need to enter in your cell phone number, select your carrier and your time zone. If you don’t have a cell phone, or maybe don’t have a text plan, you can also get the reminders by email.
The scheduler is Flash based and shows you items you’ve ordered, you just drag an item to the calendar area and a dialogue pops up that lets you schedule the days, time and how many of the item to take.
So far, this looks pretty promising and potentially useful. While I try to take my multi every day around lunch time, I admit that there are days I’m just plain distracted and forget, even though I keep a bottle right on my desk here at work. I’m even worse on weekends, so I’m hoping this will help … well, remind me to make sure I’m not skipping a day.
Here’s what the text of the message comes up as…
Not sure when they added this to the site, but I believe it’s fairly new, and it has a couple quirks I hope they address. Typically I take my multi after I eat lunch, then pop the b12 under my tongue. I couldn’t schedule both of these for the same time. I couldn’t even seem to schedule the multi for noon, and the b12 for 12:15, so I’m going to try flip-flopping them and do the b12 first. I may try to tweek the times a bit, we’ll see.
I suppose I could use my calendar on my phone to do bout the same thing, but I kind of like this option as it doesn’t clutter my my calendar and I won’t have to worry about schedule conflicts popping up if I enter in a meeting or something else for the same times.
Also, I’m not sure how far back in my orders it looked, since my calcium didn’t show up on the list of stuff I can schedule, so it would be nice to manually add something to the list… but if you’re like me and not quite as good about remembering to take your vitamins, this could be a handy way to help keep you on track.
