Hear the dosage read aloud, straight from the medicine box.
How you are meant to take your medicine is on the medicine label — in print, and nowhere else. We want the pharmacy to be able to put a small tag on the box. Hold your phone against it, and the phone reads the dosage aloud, word for word as it stands on the label. No app, no account, and not a word of it reaches us.
This doesn’t exist yet: no tag, no pharmacy writing them, no date. What exists is the idea — and this page is an invitation to pharmacies who would like to try it with us.
THE PROBLEM
The one thing on the box that is about you is the one thing you can’t read
The medicine label carries what the doctor decided for you: how much to take, how often, and what to watch out for. That text is what decides whether the medicine does any good. And it exists only in print.
The braille on the box doesn’t help. It comes from the manufacturer and says what the medicine is called and how strong it is — never how you should take it, because that is decided long after the box left the factory.
And most people who lose their sight late in life never learn braille. So even what is there reaches nowhere near everyone.
So at home you are holding a box you can’t read. You have to ask someone to read it to you, or trust that you remember it right.
THE IDEA
How it’s meant to work
Three steps. None of them asks you to learn anything new.
Step 1: The pharmacy writes the tag
As the prescription is dispensed, the pharmacy staff write a small NFC tag and stick it on the box, next to the medicine label. The same text as on the label — nothing added, nothing taken away.
Until pharmacy systems have Doris built in, staff can fill in the label on a computer and hand it over to a phone with a QR code.
Step 2: You hold your phone against the box
Most phones from the last few years read the tag by themselves. No app to install, no account, nothing to set up. A page opens.
Step 3: The dosage is read aloud
The page is built to be read aloud — VoiceOver, TalkBack — and for anyone with a little sight left: large text, high contrast, one single thing on the screen. Hear it as many times as you like.
Read aloud
Metformin Orifarm, 500 mg
1 tablet twice a day with food
Word for word. Nothing interpreted, nothing shortened.
What’s read aloud is exactly what stands on the medicine label. We do not interpret it, rewrite it or cut it down. If the text doesn’t fit on the tag we refuse to write it — better that than trimming a prescription.
That is a different thing from the Doris app, which guesses at a schedule from a photograph and asks you to check the guess. A tag doesn’t guess. It carries the text, full stop.
THE PRIVACY
We never get to see what medicine you take
This one is worth understanding properly, because it is what lets a pharmacy use this without handing us a single patient detail. So we will show you on a real tag.
A web address can have a part after the # character. That part is special: the browser never sends it to any server, it stays on the phone. Everything about the medicine goes there. Here’s what the address on a tag looks like:
https://hejdoris.se/_Reaches our server
#Stays on the phone
- Medicine
- Metformin Orifarm
- Strength
- 500 mg
- The dosage, word for word
1 tablet twice a day with food
- Package
- NPL pack id 20030919000035
- Written
- August 2026
- Issuer
- Doris development
- Signature
- Matches the issuer’s key
This is a real tag out of our test suite, signed with our own development key — not by any pharmacy. The dosage is invented.
Before the # character sits the address of the page — as short as it can be made, to fit on the tag — and nothing else. That’s the only part that reaches us, and it says nothing about you. Everything after the character stays on the phone: the page reads it, checks the signature and reads the contents aloud, without fetching anything, asking anyone or sending anything. Which is why it also works with no network.
You don’t have to take our word for it. Anyone can open the network tab in their browser, hold a phone against a tag, and watch the page send nothing at all.
The pharmacy’s signature
The tag is signed by the pharmacy that wrote it. A tag made by anyone else is recognized as false and isn’t read aloud.
The month, not the day
Doses change, but the tag stays put. So the tag says which month the box was dispensed, which makes an old box recognizable as old. The month only — an exact date says more about a person than it needs to.
No more secret than the label
Anyone holding a phone against the box can read all of this, just as anyone holding the box can read the medicine label. The point isn’t that the tag is secret. The point is that we can’t read it.
If you have Doris on your phone
Then a tap against the tag can offer to build a schedule out of the dosage, with reminders at the right times. And because the month is on the tag, the app can say so if the box is older than your latest change of dose.
But only offer. Nothing is entered until you’ve said yes. You should be able to hold your phone against a box without the phone starting to decide things for you.
If you don’t have the app, the tag works exactly as well. It exists so that the dosage can be heard — not to get you into Doris.
