Set up your household in five minutes

Create your account

The first screen is a short welcome: the FamilyDose logo, a line about one shared schedule your whole care team can see, and a Get started button. If you arrived by tapping an invite link from another caregiver, this screen is skipped and you go straight to creating your account.

The account form opens with a checkbox: "I confirm I am 18 years of age or older." FamilyDose is for adults managing a family's medications, so tick it before you continue. Below it, where your phone supports it, you can sign up with Apple. Otherwise enter your first and last name, your email, and a password (twice), then tap Continue. If you came from an invite link, the email is pre-filled with the address the invite was sent to. If you use a sign-in method that skips the checkbox, the app asks the same question in a one-time "One quick check" box before you go on.

FamilyDose can then send a verification step to confirm the email is really yours before your account is active, whether you're starting a brand-new household or joining one you were invited to.

Set up your household

Next, you either create a new household or join one you've been invited to. A household is the shared space every caregiver and patient belongs to; everyone in it sees the same medication record for the patients in that household. If you're setting up FamilyDose for the first time for your family, you'll create the household here and name it. If a co-parent, partner, or other caregiver already set one up and invited you, you'll join theirs instead.

As this step opens, if your phone has Face ID or a fingerprint reader and you haven't turned it on yet, a sheet asks "Enable Face ID?" (or the fingerprint version) and explains that you can sign in faster next time without typing your password. Tap the button to turn it on, or tap Not now to skip it. Either way, setup carries on.

Tell FamilyDose your role

FamilyDose asks how you're related to the people you're caring for, for example a parent, grandparent, or another kind of caregiver. This is a label that helps the household make sense to everyone in it. It does not set what you can do; the person who invites you chooses your access level, and it can be changed later in Settings.

Add your first patient

If you're setting up a new household, the next step is adding the first patient: a child, an aging parent, or yourself. You can add every person you're tracking medications for, and switch between them from one account. If you joined a household that already has patients in it, this step is skipped, since there's nothing to add yet.

Set your schedule and turn on notifications

Two optional steps come next. The first lets you set preferences like how you'd like times displayed and how your household's dose bands, morning, afternoon, evening, and so on, map to actual clock times. The second turns on notifications, so you and every other caregiver in the household get reminded when a dose is due. Both can be skipped and adjusted later in Settings if you'd rather come back to them.

Invite the other people who help out

Once your household exists, invite anyone else who helps with care, a co-parent, a grandparent, a nanny, from Settings. Each person you invite gets their own account and their own login, and you control what they can see and do: a caregiver can be set up to log doses without being able to change the medication list, for example, if that's the right level of access for them. This is what makes the record genuinely shared instead of something only one person maintains.

When we update our policies

You will not see a policy screen during first-time setup. If FamilyDose later publishes an updated Privacy Policy or Terms of Service, the app shows a screen titled "We've updated our" that document, with a link to read it and an I agree button, before you carry on. You will see one screen for each document that changed.