parkimate

The Parkinson's diary that keeps medication, meals and trouble on one clock.

Each entry is recorded with a single tap: the time is written down at once, while the details — what was taken, what was eaten, which symptoms appeared — may be entered whenever it suits. From the sequence of entries the application derives the reading it was designed for: how the day arranges itself around doses and meals.

  • Free of charge
  • No advertising
  • No registration
  • Data kept on the device
The Parkimate icon: a head in profile enclosing an open book, a heart and a double helix.

For anyone living with Parkinson's

In the daily management of the therapy the questions that matter concern not only how often trouble occurs but where it falls in time: at which hours of the day it appears, how long the effect of a dose holds, and whether meals bear on that pattern.

A diary that records disturbances separately from doses and meals cannot answer those questions. Parkimate therefore places the three kinds of entry on a single timeline, which is the condition for reading any one of them against the others.

Recording

An immediate action, the details afterwards

The main screen presents three large controls — medication, meal, trouble — each of which records the time and nothing else. No field is mandatory.

  • For a dose: the name of the medication and the number of units taken.
  • For a meal: the foods and an indication of protein content, on three levels.
  • For a spell of trouble: the symptoms that appeared, the severity and the duration. The episode opens with one tap and closes with a second; meanwhile a notification carries its stopwatch and the command to close it.
  • A home screen widget opens and closes an episode without opening the application.
  • Where an entry is recorded later than the event, the date and time can be corrected.

Trends

The reading a list alone does not allow

A dedicated section sets out, in legible form, what the diary contains but does not show:

  • The twenty-four hours of a typical day, each in proportion to the weight that hour usually carries.
  • The share of time spent unwell in each window following a dose.
  • The same comparison for meals, separated by protein content.
  • The interval between a dose and the meal that followed it, set against the course of the three hours thereafter.

The figures are computed only over the days for which the diary was actually kept, so that a period of no entries is not counted as a period of good health. Where the available observations are too few, the application shows no percentage at all.

Therapy

The times of each dose, with reminders

The times at which each medication is due are configurable and give rise to a notification. The dose can be recorded from the notification itself, without opening the application.

The prescribed therapy and the diary remain distinct documents: the first states what is planned, the second what actually took place. The separation is deliberate, since merging them would make an omitted dose appear to have been taken.

Accessibility

Designed to be used during a bad spell as well

Whoever keeps this diary may have tremor and bradykinesia, and keeps it during the moments of greatest difficulty too. The interface takes account of that:

  • Touch targets exceed the minimum dimensions ordinarily recommended.
  • The severity scale is set out in two rows of five rather than a single row of ten.
  • The three kinds of entry are distinguished by shape as well as by colour.
  • No function requires a drag gesture or an answer within a set time.

Documentation

A document intended for the neurological consultation

The report is an A4 document meant to be read during an appointment: the hours a day spent unwell, the monthly calendar, the typical day, the comparisons following doses and meals and, in closing, the diary day by day. The period to include is selectable, and the document is displayed within the application before any sharing takes place.

The layout is designed to remain legible in monochrome reproduction. The same period can be exported as CSV, with every field, for consultation in a spreadsheet.

Privacy that can be verified

Parkimate does not request the INTERNET permission. This is not a stated undertaking but an ascertainable fact: the permission list can be consulted on the application's store page and on the device, and without that permission Android does not allow any network connection to be opened. Automatic backup is switched off as well, so the diary is not copied to any remote service.

There is no advertising network, no analytics library and no crash reporting service. There is no account. The details are set out in the privacy policy.

Availability

The application is being prepared for publication on Google Play. It requires Android 8.0 or later and is available in Italian and English.

Parkimate is a diary: it records what the user enters and gives it back. It does not diagnose, gives no medical advice, recommends neither treatment nor dosing times, and is not a medical device. Two events noted close together in a diary do not demonstrate a causal relation. Every decision concerning the therapy rests with the treating neurologist.