Birr, a medication companion for families looking after an ageing parent, built around prayer times instead of the clock

Caregivers: Abdulrahman, who manages his parents' medication, and me. Parents: my mother Munirah and my father Mutlaq, and Abdulrahman's mother Nora and father Ahmed. Aged 57 to 65, on three to five medications a day. Two of the four parents are my own, so I keep their medical details out of everything that follows.

Conversations in Arabic: 30 minutes with my friend, 15 to 20 with each parent, plus a three-day diary of my own household, one line per dose. I asked everyone to walk me through yesterday, never “how do you usually”. A specific day is remembered. A habit is made up. I weighted the sample towards parents on purpose: most medication apps are designed by talking to the person who manages the pills, not the one who takes them.

Twelve doses over three days. Eleven were described by a prayer or a meal (after Fajr, with lunch). One by the clock. Someone asked “did anyone give…” four times. The one real scare came on the second evening, when my brother and I each assumed the other had given the Isha dose. Nobody had.

Age 23. Parents' meds per day: 5 (father), 3 (mother). Also helps: his sister. Current system: WhatsApp family group and memory.

Age 23. Parents' meds per day: 4 (father), 3 (mother). Also helps: my brother. Current system: WhatsApp family group and a weekly pill organiser.

Age 57. Meds per day: 3. Also helps: me and my brother. Current system: pill organiser filled on Fridays, reminders by phone.

Age 63. Meds per day: 4. Also helps: me and my brother. Current system: keeps the boxes by the prayer mat. “I know my medicine.”

Age 60. Meds per day: 3. Also helps: Abdulrahman and his sister. Current system: boxes in a kitchen drawer, the daughter reminds her.

Age 65. Meds per day: 5. Also helps: Abdulrahman. Current system: a paper schedule on the fridge from his last clinic visit.

A pill reminder built for the patient managing themselves. Six medicines took me 9 minutes to schedule, six screens each, clock times only. The Arabic is partial: the drug database stays English, plurals are wrong (“1 حبات”), numerals switch mid-screen, and the dose sheet breaks direction after a Latin drug name. Family support is Medfriend: one linked contact gets a push when a dose is missed, both need accounts and internet, and reviewers say it arrives hours late.

The Ministry of Health platform for appointments, records and e-prescriptions. Six medicines took 14 minutes, in one list under the health wallet, clock times only. Native Arabic, mirrors correctly, scales well. Dependents share one account for records, but nobody confirms a dose to anyone.

The pharmacy chain's shopping app: products, prescription upload, delivery or pickup. No schedules, no reminders. It sells and delivers. Native Arabic, mirrors, though some product cards stay left to right. Text does not scale.

Self-management apps, health-system apps, pharmacy apps. Medisafe comes closest, but it is one patient's app with a spectator attached: clock-based, English-first, late alert. Nobody has built the family app, where the schedule is written in prayers, the parent's own tap is the confirmation, and every sibling can see who did what.

Works full-time in Riyadh and lives with her parents. Her brother Mohammed helps on weekends, a home helper is there on weekdays. She runs her mother's medication from a screenshot of the last prescription and a WhatsApp group. Her fear: the wrong dose after a doctor changes something.

Type 2 diabetes and high cholesterol: Metformin twice a day, Aspirin, Atorvastatin at night, Vitamin D. Reads Arabic comfortably, uses WhatsApp voice notes and the Quran app. Doesn't want to feel like a patient in her own house.

Wants to help when he's around, and wants to see in one glance whether Mom has taken her evening pills.

I want to update the routine once and have everyone see it, so nobody gives her the old dose.

I want to know whether Mom has taken her pills, so I don't nag her and my brother doesn't double-dose her.

I want to be told days early, so I pick it up on the way home instead of at 11 pm.

I want to press one thing and get on with my day, so I don't feel managed.

…make it effortless for a family to keep a parent's medication on track without making the parent feel monitored?

For a concept I can only measure the prototype: task completion, time on task and SUS. If this shipped I'd track on-time dose rate, refill-on-time rate, and weekly active caregivers per family circle. The last one is the real health signal.

Medication schedules, prayer-time anchoring, Parent mode, family circle with roles, refill tracking, missed-dose escalation, weekly pill-organiser prep, Arabic and English.

Ordering from pharmacies (a Birr Plus request), telehealth, vitals, clinical advice, and automatic phone calls. An earlier version escalated to a call. In the parents' own words that was the policing they dread, so it went. The app never says what to take, only when the family agreed it was taken.

Splash · welcome · sign up (Apple / Google) · phone · code · notifications.

Adherence score · today's numbers · Mom's routine · activity feed.

List · detail · add (name and dose → photos → when: after prayer or exact time) · prepare medicines.

Circle members with roles · invite by link.

Parent mode · late-dose steps · numerals · notifications · language · Birr Plus.

Due: the medicine and one button, I took it. Confirmed: well done, with a one-tap undo. Late: “a little late, that's okay”.

Refill (supply gauge → three-day nudge → request) · missed-dose escalation · weekly preparation (the pill-organiser checklist grouped by prayer slot) · offline and loading states · eight error states.

Canvas.

Cards, sheets.

Text, primary button, tab bar.

Secondary text, 5.0:1 on white.

Decorative only (arrows, dots).

Hairlines.

Confirmed: fill and text.

Due now, running low: fill vs. text.

Out of stock, errors: fill vs. text.

Verified seal, links.

Late count.

Every semantic colour has a soft tint for backgrounds and a text-safe variant that clears 4.5:1. The bright version is only ever a fill. Colour is never the only signal: every state pairs it with an icon and a label.

Caregiver mode: 30 · 28 bold · 1.3 (Ar) / 1.18 (En). Parent mode: 30 bold.

Caregiver mode: 20 bold · 17 semibold. Parent mode: 24 semibold (medicine name).

Caregiver mode: 15 · 1.4. Parent mode: 17.

Caregiver mode: 13. Parent mode: 13.

Caregiver mode: 15 medium. Parent mode: 19 medium, 60pt button.

Nothing below 13pt. Everything scales with the OS text size. Parent mode has a size floor and never truncates.

20pt page margins, 16 between blocks, 18 inside cards, 10 between elements, 14 row rhythm.

Radius 20 for cards, 24 for the parent's card, 32 for the welcome sheet, full for pills and chips.

Limited to state changes. The dose card settling into confirmed is a smart-animate. Respects Reduce Motion and never blocks input.

Black · Outline · Text, each with pressed. Full-width pill, 52pt. 60pt in Parent mode.

Active = Today · Meds · Family · Settings. Floating black pill, white active capsule.

Caregiver · Parent. Title-first, 44pt round actions.

Adherence and the 2×2 numbers.

Default, with the verified seal on or off. Medicine, member and activity rows.

ok · low · out. Segmented, counts down in days.

Active · Inactive. Filters, prayer slots and the after-prayer / exact-time switch.

due · confirmed · late. The whole parent experience.

taken · now · upcoming. The five prayer slots.

default · error. Forms and verification.

States.

Onboarding.

Tokens live as Figma variables (collection v4 · Editorial warm) and export to JSON for engineering.

Every readable text pair is at least 4.5:1 (secondary grey 5.0:1, all coloured text through the text-safe tokens). Two non-text pairs are logged as open: the hairline field boundary needs 3:1 on ivory, and the amber gauge bars sit at 2.6:1, so the bars get a deeper amber.

44pt minimum everywhere, 60pt in Parent mode. Text links carry hidden 44pt hit areas.

13pt floor. Dynamic Type supported. Parent mode wraps, never ellipsises.

Always text plus colour, never colour alone, and every error state has a way out. Eight states designed in each language.

An Arabic-first accessible name documented for every icon-only control (“رجوع”, “إضافة دواء”, “التنبيهات · 3 جديدة”…) and the parent's card announced as one group: “Metformin 500 mg, one tablet with lunch, due now”.

Respects Reduce Motion. The confirm animation falls back to a cross-fade. Nothing auto-advances.

Parent mode shows one decision at a time, uses the family's own words (“after Maghrib”), and never uses medical jargon.

Two parents tapped the pill photo instead of the button. Now the whole card is the tap target, and the button grew to 60pt.

Both caregivers looked for a clock time before the prayer chips. Now the “when” step offers after prayer and exact time side by side, with the resolved time under each prayer chip.

A parent read “late” as a scolding. Now the late state says “a little late, that's okay, take it now”.

The automatic call was cut from the escalation ladder. The sign-up buttons lost the company names and kept the logos. Feminine-only Arabic copy was made neutral so a son and a daughter read the same sentence. The header spacing was rebuilt after the first Arabic pass clipped titles.

The v4 · Editorial warm variable collection exported from Figma (Dev Mode → Variables → JSON) to tokens.json, generated into CSS custom properties / Swift constants (--color-ink, --space-4, --text-title). One source, both sides.

The root sets dir="rtl" or dir="ltr" from the language setting. Layout uses logical properties only (margin-inline-start, inset-inline-end), so there is no separate RTL stylesheet. The tab bar keeps Today → Meds → Family → Settings in both directions.

Intl.NumberFormat('ar-SA-u-nu-arab') when Eastern Arabic digits are on. Intl.DateTimeFormat for Hijri and Gregorian. Phone numbers and one-time codes are always LTR.

Drug names rendered inside <bdi> (or a leading U+200F in native strings) so a Latin name never flips an Arabic sentence.

Computed on-device from location with the Umm al-Qura parameters. The schedule stores the slot and the offset, not the time.

Each Figma component maps to a code component with the same name and state props. DoseCard takes state: 'due' | 'confirmed' | 'late' | 'snoozed' and confirmedBy?: string. ListRow takes verified: boolean. SupplyGauge takes daysLeft: number and derives ok | low | out.

Every icon-only control ships with its documented accessibilityLabel in both languages. Error text is linked to its field and focus moves to the first invalid field on submit. The notification alert traps focus while open.

Building the product on one cultural truth, prayer times, gave every later decision a spine. Splitting the app into two modes felt expensive and turned out to be the simplification that made everything else possible. Designing Arabic first produced a cleaner English app than the other way round ever has for me.

Studying my own family cut both ways: unmatched access, and a constant risk of writing down what I already believed. The diary helped. A third household I didn't know would have helped more, and I'd test with parents I hadn't interviewed.

Cutting a feature can be the strongest design move. Removing the automatic call made the escalation model make sense. In Parent mode, copy is the product: changing late to “a little late, that's okay” did more than any layout change. And testing proved me wrong about one thing. I was sure prayer slots alone would be enough for caregivers. They weren't. Both wanted a plain clock for at least one medicine, and the schedule step is better for it.