As you get older, you may notice your medicine cabinet becoming more and more crowded. Older adults tend to use prescription medications at a much higher rate than young people, with some seniors taking up to five or more prescriptions a day. When you’re juggling this many pills, it can be difficult to remember which medications you’ve taken and when. Ebenezer Senior Living has compiled a short list of medication management tools to help you keep track of your prescriptions.
A Days-of-the-Week Pill Box
There are many options available for pill boxes that hold seven days’ worth of daily medications in easy-to-open, clearly labeled compartments. Some of these are as simple as seven boxes marked Sunday through Saturday – which you can make at home if you’re crafty – while some are divided into morning, afternoon, and evening segments per day, like the Weekly Deluxe Pill Box from Medline.
One or Multiple Alarms
Setting alarms on your phone is a good way to remind yourself to take your medication, but it isn’t infallible – you may not be near your phone or the battery might die. Some daily pill boxes come with built-in alarms to remind you when it’s time to take your medication, such as Med-E-Lert, which also includes a flashing light alarm for the hearing impaired. The contraption is designed to be simple for anyone to use and comes with 28 compartments for medications.
A Phone App
If you’re more technologically savvy or have a tech-savvy caretaker or loved one, a medication reminder phone app can be very helpful. MediSafe has a reputation as one of the best apps on the market for this purpose. The software is free, provides personalized reminder messages with drug interaction warnings, and can be easily synced to a caregiver or friend’s phone to notify them when the medication has been taken.
A Reminder Service
If you’d prefer a simpler kind of technology or pill boxes don’t work well enough for you, several services exist to call seniors and remind them to take their medications. While most of these services require paid subscriptions, the cost is worth it to help alleviate concerns about taking medications on time. Some services, like Medication Call Reminder, even allow a senior’s caregiver to record a personalized message.
We hope that these suggestions were able to give you some ideas on where to start when looking for medication reminder options. For more information on helpful tools to take advantage of, visit Ebenezer’s blog.
