Hand sanitizers may have disappeared off the shelves amid the COVID-19 pandemic but they aren’t the most effective measure to keep you safe. Washing your hands is better. It’s only in the absence of soap and water that you should use hand sanitizer to keep your hands clean and germ-free. If you’re struggling to remember to wash your hands regularly, there’s a free app for iOS called Wash Hands Reminder N Tracker that can remind you regularly, or when you reach a particular location to wash your hands.
Install Wash Hands Reminder N Tracker from the App Store. It is free to download, has no in-app purchases, and does not show any ads. Open the app and allow it to show you notifications when it prompts you for permission.
The app has two tabs; location-based, and Time-based where you can choose how you want to receive reminders to wash your hands. The Time-Based tab allows you to set up reminders for every hour, and every 2, 3, or 4 hours. There’s also an active period for these reminders since the app knows you won’t need to wash your hands when you’re asleep. You can use the ‘Starts’ and ‘Ends’ times to set the active period. Outside this period, you won’t get reminders to wash your hands.
As for the location-based reminders, you have to first set it up so that the app knows which places are destinations it should remind you to wash your hands in e.g., you don’t want reminders at a bus stop since water and soap may not be available (use sanitizer instead) but you want a reminder when you get to work or come home.
Go to the Location-based tab and set up the different locations. You will be given a map to select a location and each location can be given a friendly name. Once you set the locations up, you have the option to enable or disable alerts for each one independently. The app will need access to your location in order to send you location-based reminders to wash your hands.
Wash Hands Reminder N Tracker should work on most iOS devices since it requires iOS 11 and later.
The app is well thought out so there isn’t much missing in terms of features but the active period feature is a bit limited. It can only be as long as 12 hours and plenty of people are awake for more than that time. It should offer users complete freedom to set the active period as long or as short as they need it to be.
