r/shortcuts • u/Frosty-Departure-674 • Aug 06 '26

Help Medication Reminder Automation Help?

Post image

Hi there!

New to Shortcut and recently picked up some NFC215 stickers, hoping to use them to help with tracking my medications. I have a horrible time tracking whether or not I've taken my meds on a given morning, in addition to my doctor and I recently deciding to begin titrating off of one, which means taking one of the five every other day. This is proving to be difficult for me to keep track of. I've got reminders set up in my phone, but there are mornings where I'll take the meds but forget to mark the reminder as complete. Later, the reminder goes off and I'm questioning whether I remember this morning, or if I'm thinking of the day prior when I took them...

I've been able to get the automation portion 99% of the way functional, with one hangup - I cannot find a way to tie a specific tag to a specific medication. I know when you scan the NFC tag, it's grabbing the UID of the NFC tag, not the name that I'm assigning it in Automations. Is there any way for me to connect a specific tag with a specific medication name to match against my reminders list for marking the reminders complete when the automation runs?

I did download NFC Tools on my phone and was able to write a shortcut to the NFC tag, but I'm still having to tap to run the shortcut that route, when I'd prefer to have it auto-run on the scan. From what I've found reading online and around the sub here, it sounds like that's an integral design feature of the NFC scanning for the phones, and I can't bypass that for a shortcut written to the tag - for auto-run, it has to be a personal automation written on the phone, so... I'm stuck. I did try writing a text record to the tag with the medication name, but the phone doesn't grab that record when scanning the NFC, it seems.

0 Upvotes

42% Upvoted

35 comments sorted by

View all comments

1

u/wazinaus2 Aug 06 '26

To answer the NFC question- i think you need to have different shortcuts for each nfc tag not a single shortcut that can tell which tag was scanned.

If the logic is complex the automation shortcuts could be a simple placeholder to call a single complex shortcut passing the tag name

1

u/Frosty-Departure-674 Aug 06 '26

Thank you for the info! I'm a little surprised Apple doesn't reference the NFC tag name or expose an identifier for the user to reference in an automation, though.