So background, my kid has seizures often. He is currently on 5 different medications to try to control it(plus 1 for sleeping and 1 for his liver enzymes) plus severe non verbal autism so he can’t tell us if he already had his meds. Currently when it’s medication time, it’s always “did you give him his meds yet?” and we have no way of tracking how many seizures he actually has besides “alot more recently” or “it’s gone down recently”. Yes he had multiple doctors and this is NOT a post looking for health advice.
I am creating an app for phones(c# Maui) which will send json objects to a api to store/retrieve data in a database(when he last had medication x, when he has a seizure etc). It will probably only be used with in my family, maybe 20 entries a day on a really bad day(7 medications twice daily + 6 seizures to give a round number) but should be less then 10 transactions(most medications given at same time).
What’s the cheapest/easiest was I can host something like this? I do not have a static ip. Yes it’s health information but I’m only storing first names and tracking time of events, not too worried about hippa like security.
HIPAA (not hippa) is not even remotely applicable.
Cheap and easy are in opposition here. Which matters more? There are symptom and medication apps already that would be easy and available right now. And you don’t need to do tech support for family.
Well it’s also a learning project as through a series of events I am technically a software developer in job title who got thrown into a c# code base with databases after doing a python boot camp for 9 weeks and have no mentor to tell me what I’m doing wrong on professional projects.
Ah - I get that. You have my sympathies.
A personal project like that would be a great way to train/get experience then. But do realize that it becomes a lot more complicated once you have people other than yourself relying on your application. Suddenly up-time becomes a lot very important and up-time is hard. End-users, even friendly ones, get very frustrated when you say “try now please” a lot. They’ll just stop using it.
If it is for home use, why not go with a raspberry pi (or similar, there are lots of cheaper alternatives like it) which is only accessible from the local network and not from the internet?
If access through the internet is needed, you can use one of many free dyndns services. (e.g duckdns.org)
You could also look into existing projects and maybe contribute instead of building from scratch, but thats up to you. Through a quick search I found https://github.com/FSchiltz/Helse but I am not sure whether it suits your needs.
Hmm…i do have a raspberry pi that isn’t being used… Since it’s asp.net should be Linux compatible… Not a bad idea
Just a quick note for hosting a DB on a pi (or anything that uses SD cards for the OS), SD cards fail with some regularity, so I strongly suggest getting an NVMe board with a stick of SSD memory to store the actual files, because it’s much more reliable long term for data integrity. SD cards support reading large amounts but writes wear them out more quickly.
You can find great cases that come with the boards (but not the SSD, however that’s very easy to find separately).
For RPi 4 I have an Argon (NVMe board sold as accessory): https://argon40.com/products/argon-one-v2-case-for-raspberry-pi-4
And fro RPi 5 I have a Pironman case (NVMe comes as part of the kit): https://www.sunfounder.com/products/pironman-5-nvme-m-2-ssd-pcie-mini-pc-case-for-raspberry-pi-5
I recommend both of those but your use case may vary.
Thank you very much for pointing this out.
I completely forgot to mention this, since I’ve been running compute modules with nvme’s for ages.
Just to add a further alternative: The pine64 soquartz baseboards are also compatible with rpi compute modules.
Also for extra saving: by the time you buy all that, there are a lot of second hand office mini PCs that are considerably cheaper on ebay.
I’d use something that already exists:
- https://life-notes.fr/
- https://github.com/babybuddy/babybuddy
- https://github.com/BabyTracker/baby-tracker
The focus of the latter two is slightly off, but it would work.
Actually, I’d probably not add a use-specific thing unless I needed something specific it offered. I’d just pop up another page on our shared wiki to track things, or put it in a synced note app.
Google Sheets will be a simple solution you can do for free.
The app “Track & Graph” is another.
I have been logging all my medical events using Tasker and a Google Calendar. Analysis is manual using graphviz.
This is c/selfhosted
The boundary of where to host what, is not fixed. You cannot host the internet at home. Where people sit on the spectrum varies depending on skill, resources and need.
I highlighted several options that provide a solution for someone with limited skills and resources.
You could host a CALDAV server or a next cloud at home and use the suggestions I provided, or you could use those hosted by someone else.
My answer was to provide ideas, not a how-to guide, answering, in my opinion, exactly what OP was looking for.
That it doesn’t match your idea about solving the problem tells you that there are many ways to solve software problems. My suggestions had a low barrier to entry.
What’s your recommendation for OP?
Do you need a web app, or would a mobile app do? There are a number of medication trackers and one specifically for tracking stuff like this called Track & Graph. The DB export is a SQLite DB, which can be SyncThing’ed to a computer and worked with with whatever rolls you like.
This is what I was thinking.
Syncthing will be the quickest to set up.
There’s a potential for collisions but that would likely be manageable.
