What happens after a power outage?

Power cuts happen — and for medication timing they matter. Medsage handles them carefully instead of silently pretending nothing happened.

How recovery works

The device continuously keeps a record of the last moment it was alive. When power returns:

• Short blips (under about 12 minutes) are treated as a simple restart. Nothing to do; no questions asked.
• Longer outages: once the device reconnects and re-syncs its clock, it walks through the medication schedule and works out exactly which doses would have fired during the gap.

What the patient sees

For a real outage the device shows a recovery screen:

“Power was lost for 2h 15m. You may have missed 1 dose(s). Did you take your medication?”

…with the list of missed dose times and two buttons: ”✓ I Took Them” and ”✗ I Missed Them”. The patient’s answer is recorded for each dose, so the adherence history reflects what actually happened rather than a guess.

If the device can’t tell the time

If the device restarts without network access, it can’t know how long it was off. It says so honestly:

“Device was restarted. Time is unknown — medications may have been missed. Please connect to WiFi or contact your caretaker.”

Caretakers are informed that the device recovered in a degraded state.

What caretakers see

Power-recovery and dose-reconciliation events are recorded to the device’s history, so a caretaker reviewing the log can see the outage, which doses were affected, and how the patient answered.