If you have a smartphone, you probably know what apps are — but did you know they can actually help to make caregiving more manageable? A smartphone is like having a mini-computer with you at all times — and the best caregiving apps help manage the many aspects of care that barrage and overwhelm most caregivers on any given day. Caregiving apps can help you maintain and update important information, get appointment and medication reminders, keep a log of activities, coordinate various caregivers, jot down notes from doctors or other care providers, and stay in touch with and pass on updates and photos to family and friends.
Track your gambling gains and losses with this Android app. With this app, you can track all the games that you play at the casino or at home. Track any game you play, for example, Texas HoldEm. You Borrowed It is an app that can keep track of it all. Android/iOS/WP/BB: I'm pretty generous when it comes to my friends—I loan music, video games, you name it, if I trust them to take. The blue line is my actual results over 615 bets in that time period. These are the odds I actually bet the matches at. The stats are as follows: 352-250-13, +77.32u, +8.9% ROI, +1.94% CLV, +12.3 average cents of CLV per bet, and I beat the closing line 70% of the time. For every mile tracked in your Charity Miles team, you earn money for a charity from the app’s sponsorship pool. This is a brilliantly selfless approach to competition, allowing you to raise money to support others while you and your colleagues get a good workout. You also have the added option to get sponsored by friends during the competition.
The world of caregiving apps is growing, and it needs to. Caregivers need every tool at hand to manage all that caregiving throws at you.
We’ve compiled a list of some of the most impressive and helpful apps for managing a loved one’s care. Disease-specific apps (for those with a loved one who has Alzheimer’s, cancer, heart disease, or diabetes, for example) are also available. You may find that a single app doesn’t offer everything you need, so be sure to try a few. Most are free, or quite reasonably priced, and they can help make your caregiving life much easier.
Overview of The Best Apps for Caregivers
CaringBridge
CaringBridge is just that — a bridge that allows you and your loved ones to stay in touch. It’s a perfect app for a family that rallies around a loved one in need of care, and for those who are facing surgeries, rehabilitation, and procedures that go along with conditions such as cancer, heart disease, or diabetes. The app offers a space for multiple caregivers and family members to share pertinent information, such as updates, encouragement, and arranging care. There’s a guest book offering a place for journal entries, medical updates, photos, stories, and tributes.
This is a wonderful addition to caregiver apps and unique in that it creates a place for more than managing a loved one’s care — you can uplift, stay in the loop and help each other through a difficult time.
What’s Great About CaringBridge:
CaringBridge specializes in keeping loved ones connected. By focusing on this important goal, the app’s designers have created a product that not only passes along information but is also a holding place for good thoughts, encouragement, and photos as well as medical and caregiving updates. These features make CaringBridge a uniquely thoughtful and comprehensive tool.
Get the app:
Lotsa Helping Hands
Lotsa Helping Hands is a caregiving app that helps you create a community of care around your loved one. You can invite family, friends, volunteers, and care aides to join and then manage everything from sitters and errands to appointments and family gatherings using an interactive calendar.
There’s also a section of the app called “Helping Hands,” which serves as a message board and a well-wishes wall where caregivers, family, and friends can leave messages of encouragement for the person receiving care or for someone else in the care circle. This app lets you choose a coordinator and a community member page where you can update contact information, birthdates, and list the best times to call. These features make Lotsa Helping Hands a good resource for creating a vibrant care community.
What’s Great About Lotsa Helping Hands:
Lotsa Helping Hands has much to offer caregivers and their loved ones. The webpage offers real support, stories from other caregivers, a newsletter, and additional features that complement the app.
Get the app:
- Not available on Android
Caring Village
The Caring Village app is designed specifically for family caregivers to help them easily coordinate and keep track of their loved one’s care.
Caring Village CEO and Co-founder Mike Behrman says he was inspired to launch the app after he and his wife became caregivers for his mother-in-law, who has dementia. “We realized that the most important thing we needed to do was communicate effectively with other family members, her care professionals and neighbors,” he said in a news release.
The app is meant to enable family caregivers to do just that via a secure messaging system where users can create “villages” among friends and relatives to help coordinate the specifics of a loved one’s care. Caring Village users can create customizable care plans for their loved ones plus personalized to-do lists. The app’s features also include a centralized calendar, document storage, a place to list medications, and a wellness journal that allows you to share entries with the rest of your “village.”
App To Keep Track Of Bets With Friends
What’s Great About Caring Village:
Reviewers say the app is easy to use and gives them peace of mind about staying on top of their loved one’s care plan. As AARP’s Anne Marie Kilgallon was quoted as saying in a Tech Crunch article earlier this year, “[Caring Village is] all about the connection between family, care givers and care recipients.”
Get the app:
- iPhone/iPad (free)
- Android (free)
CareZone
CareZone is another great, free care-based app. You can keep all of your loved one’s pertinent information on the secured app and invite family and friends to view and participate in his or her care. It has a place for notes and observations, a task list, medication logging (including pharmacy numbers, dosing, prescribing physicians, etc.), a place to upload photos — and you can even send a voice message to up to 100 recipients. That’s one impressive app!
What’s Great About CareZone:
For a free app, this covers most of your informational bases. It’s excellent for storing and sharing information – and for knowing that it’s secure. CareZone isn’t just a caregiving app; family members of all ages can use it.
Get the app:
eCare21
eCare21 provides round-the-clock patient monitoring through wireless and wearable devices such as a smartwatch or FitBit. You can track the wearer’s glucose, heart rate, activity, medication, weight, calorie intake, and sleep. You, your loved one, other family members, and doctors can access this useful information no matter where they live or work.
eCare will be most helpful for caregivers as they manage their loved one’s schedules and meet their health needs, but it may take several apps or websites to tackle more complex caregiving challenges such as pain management, medication interaction, financial and end-of-life issues.
What’s Great About eCare21:
eCare21’s latest technology allows you to monitor your loved one’s care needs without being intrusive. It’s ideal for a working or long-distance caregiver and by providing vital health data, which means better and quicker response. Forbes offered a favorable review of eCare21 stating, “The patients’ doctors, loved ones and caregivers can keep an eye on them and provide proactive care, even from hundreds of miles away.”
Get the app:
Medisafe
Any caregiver knows the frustrations and concerns involved in medication management. You have to remember when the medication should be taken, whether or not to take it with food, avoiding double dosage, any side effects to watch out for, and make sure to track the medication for benefits or drawbacks. Medisafe Meds & Pill Reminder can help alleviate some of these concerns with reminders, helpful and practical information, and connecting caregivers, seniors, and the medical community together to provide cohesive care.
While some users noted frustrations with loading several medications at various time intervals, it should also be noted that MediSafe receives high marks for customer support. Each online review concern is addressed by the app’s support team.
What’s Great About Medisafe:
Medisafe is unique in that it’s not only a medication reminder but also educates people about their condition and the medicines they’re taking. Medisafe can help to remind, track progress, and will even find coupons and other incentives. Medisafe is designed for users of any age, for caregivers involved in medication monitoring, and is also beneficial for physicians who want to connect with their patients through the Medisafe app. Medisafe has been featured on CNBC and in Reader’s Digest.
Get the app:
Ever wondered how you are actually doing in sports betting?
Just like tracking your finances can be an eye opening experience (I spent how much at restaurants last month?!), tracking your bets can shed some light on your performance.
Download the free sports bet tracking spreadsheet below to get started (available for both Excel and Google Sheets):
Bet Tracker Spreadsheet: Instant Insights
If you want to measure your performance and see where you are succeeding and failing, you need to track it.
App To Keep Track Of Bets With Friends Forever
With this free tool, you can see your performance broken down by various dimensions.
Have a great ROI on betting NBA 2nd halves? Getting solid closing line value on NFL point spreads? This spreadsheet allows you to answer questions like this and more.
How to use the spreadsheet
While the spreadsheet is pretty straightforward, I’d like to walk you through how it works.
How to track sports bets
Everything lives in the “Bet Log” tab. This is the only place information is manually entered. Once the data is entered there, all other tabs will automatically populate.
In the “Bet Log” tab, blue columns are required while red columns are optional. The more information you input, the more useful the spreadsheet will be.
Entering things like the closing line, while slightly annoying, will also be the most important to your success.
How to analyze performance
Each tab will have different graphs and tables that show your performance. The beauty of this is that you can filter the data by any dimension you like.
Any yellow cell is an “input” cell that can be changed. All of these are dropdowns that are pre-populated based on the information you enter in the Bet Log.
How to add more leagues and teams
To add new leagues and teams, you will do so in the “REF” tab. This tab holds all of the lookup information for the dropdowns throughout the spreadsheet.
Again, the cells available to modify are in yellow. You can add the following dimensions:
- Leagues (ex: WNBA)
- Teams (ex: Chicago Sky)
- Tags (ex: 2nd half)
Bet Tracker Spreadsheet Metrics
Deciding what to track is important in determining how you measure success. The spreadsheet tracks the following key metrics:
Closing Line Value
Closing line value (CLV) is a measure of how much better or worse the odds you bet at were compared to where they closed.
If you believe the markets you are betting into are efficient (NFL point spreads, MLB moneylines, etc.), then CLV is a great predictor of long term success.
All you need to do is input the odds you placed your bet at as well as where the odds closed. Preferably you use a market making sportsbook like Pinnacle to decide what the “true” closing line was.
Profit
Profit is about as simple as it gets. Are you making or losing money?
App To Keep Track Of Bets With Friends At A
While this is the “bottom line”, surprisingly it isn’t always predictive of long term success. Still, you will obviously want to see how much money you have made or lost.
ROI
This is what most people tend to look at. It is a measure of how profitable you are relative to how much you are risking.
While at the end of the day, the money in your pocket is what matters, this metric focuses more on results rather than process and is a measure of efficiency.
ROI isn’t as predictive of long term winning as CLV, but is useful to track to see where you stand.
Risk
This one is simple, yet will likely give you insights into where you are putting your money.
If you have a model, does it consistently value the Dallas Cowboys differently than the market? Thus making many of your bets on the Cowboys? Analyzing your risk by league/team/bet type can give you these types of answers.
Bankroll
Bankroll will track our running total of how much money you have in your accounts across all sportsbooks. You can also see this trended over time to help you see any changes in your betting strategy and how that has affected your bankroll.
It is very useful to see, at a glance, where your money lies. Is 95% of our bankroll at FanDuel? Maybe you should shift some to DraftKings.
Bet Tracker Spreadsheet Dimensions
Having these metrics available is important, but insights really come from slicing the data by different dimensions.
League/Team
Tracking your performance by league or team can give you clues into where your strengths or weaknesses are.
Do you watch every second of every New York Knicks game? Think you have an edge on Knicks games? You can find out using the spreadsheet.
Same goes for leagues. Do you follow NFL closely but use strictly numbers for NCAA Basketball? Compare the performance of the two and see what’s working.
Bet Type
Looking at performance by bet type can also shed some light on your process, especially if it is model driven.
Track your performance by the following bet types:
- Spread
- Moneyline
- Total
- Prop
- Future
You can also use the “Tag” field to designate special types of bets. For example, if you want to see your performance on moneylines for NBA 2nd halves, you would put “2H” (or something similar) in the Tag field and “moneyline” in the bet type field.
Date
A common way to analyze performance is to look at metrics trended over time.
Look at any of the metric/dimension combinations above trended over any time period you’d like.
Want to see your performance over the last 14 days? Or how about the last 12 weeks? Both are possible here.
Google Sheets Sports Betting Tracker
The sports betting tracker is also available on Google Sheets. While the features are the same as the Excel file, Google Sheets has some notable benefits:
- Available/online at all times
- Can enter bets on your phone using the Sheets app
- You don’t need to be at a computer to enter your bets
- Google Sheets auto saves any changes
- Allows multiple users to be in the sheet at the same time and make changes
