Selfhosted
A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.
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Not the advice you're looking for but I wouldn't do this.. I have a lot of experience with servers and software development and I wouldn't do it. The amount of effort to make and support a robust system like this is bigger than running a Jellyfin server for friends.
The client needs to be super user friendly and robust. It should work even when the server is unavailable. And you'll need to be on the hook for support. The server would need high availability as well for people adding reminders and schedules. Those are expensive requirements both in terms of money and time. Redundancy isn't cheap.
If these things aren't true the users won't trust the system and/or won't use it. Or a dementia patient could become confused. Maybe they skip medication or double-take it because a reminder wasn't shown? Think through your failure modes carefully.
I appreciate the thoughtfulness. I'm not dead set on self hosting - I figured that the relatively simple functionality might already exist in some tools. The client side of the solution would involve no interaction which is why I considered the self hosting route. If the server goes down, as long is it continues to display the time/date/last know notes/messages without any intervention then it would meet our needs. A dashboard tool that runs some elements independently and queries a server for updates on occasion.
I did find MagicMirror, which looks like it could be set up with an SBC connected to a monitor. I haven't yet had time to dig in to its workings to see if would meet the offline/online requirements.
I also found calendarclock.app which, while not self hosted, is purpose built for this scenario and would allow the recycling of existing hardware.
So long as you understand and accept the risks - that's your call. Glad you're thinking things through.
That calendarclock looks promising actually. One of the things I was going to suggest was some sort of "client monitoring" to ensure that the screen has been updated so that it doesn't display old events which would be very confusing to somebody struggling with a sense of time. And their admin app seems to provide you with a "last updated" time which you could check to see if it's working. Hopefully there could be some alarms/notifications if it hasn't updated recently?
Either way - I hope the person you intend this for is doing well. As well as those caregiving.
You really don't need a server for this functionality. You could handle everything locally with a bit of python and use an s3 connection or something to set changes remotely. It should be an extremely simple project.
It's not like he's developing a product that needs to meet FDA regulations or support hundreds of or something.