Comparison
Phone alarms or a reminder service?
The obvious answer to forgetting something at two o'clock is an alarm at two o'clock. It works more often than people expect, and fails in a very particular way.
Short answer
An alarm tells you that it is time, but not what for. Once several alarms exist, they get silenced automatically and stop meaning anything. A reminder carries the message itself, in words, which is what makes it act on.
What alarms do well
- Free, built into every phone, no accounts or setup.
- Fine for one or two fixed daily things.
- Loud, which matters with hearing loss.
- Entirely under the person's own control.
Where they fail
A beep is only a signal, not information. After a few weeks, silencing it becomes reflexive and the person goes back to whatever they were doing without acting.
Setting them requires navigating the phone, so any change means someone physically doing it. And nobody else ever knows whether an alarm was acted on.
What a reminder adds
Words. "Time for lunch, mum, there's soup in the fridge" is actionable in a way that a tone never is, and a spoken version reaches someone who cannot easily read a screen.
It also lets family set and change things remotely, and see whether it was confirmed.
When an alarm is enough
If there is one thing at one time, the person is comfortable with their phone, and nobody else needs to know it happened — use the alarm. There is no need to add anything.