One less thing
to manage.

After our kidney transplant, I faced a demanding new routine. Alongside managing medicines, there was a need to record every drink and every urine measurement. Keeping up with these records became part of my everyday life during recovery.

I started with a paper booklet provided by the hospital, but using it every day was difficult. Damp hands and water droplets damaged the pages, and keeping up with the entries became another burden during my recovery.

I wanted a simpler way to manage the records. That was how FluidTracker began. The first version was a simple web app hosted privately for me to use. With an IT background in the family, advice on security and privacy helped guide its development.

Using the app every day helped me see what needed improving. A few small bugs came up and were fixed along the way. Over time, FluidTracker became a useful part of my daily routine.

FluidTracker has worked well for our day-to-day recording during recovery. This is my personal experience of using it, and it gave me the confidence to take it further and share it with others.

When I showed the first version to the doctor, she was excited and called another doctor over to have a look. She asked whether other patients could use it too.

She explained that patients’ recording booklets often ended up worn or torn. Entries were usually made just after a toilet visit, sometimes with wet hands. With the paper getting wet and drying out several times a day, the pages gradually became damaged. It was a problem I recognised from my own experience.

We also discussed how the app could make the records more useful. The booklet did not include daily totals, while the app brought together daily summaries, charts, and the difference between recorded fluid intake and urine output. This made it easier to look back at the figures and see changes over time.

The doctor felt that having these details together could give her a clearer picture and more information to refer to when making decisions about care.

That conversation encouraged us to take the project further. What began as a tool for my own daily recording became an app we wanted to share with everyone. We hope it can make daily recording easier for others facing similar challenges.