Tobor to the Rescue? Home Medication Dispensers

When I was a child, there was a movie — or maybe a tv show — with a friendly robot named Tobor.  Tobor soon became an imaginary friend for the neighborhood children, and conveniently, someone we could blame when we forgot to close a door or knocked something over.  “Tobor did it!”

Fast forward many years and last week, during a meeting at my Area Agency on Aging, I learned the AAA had entered into a contract with a company that makes home medication dispensers to provide the devices at a modest cost to clients in the county.  “Tobor for the Boomer Generation!”

The device, about the size of a blender or coffee machine, can be pre-loaded with a large number of doses of different kinds of medications with different dispensing schedules, and with recorded messages such as “Drink with water.”  The machine signals the client to take the revealed dose, and continues the signal until the medication is removed.  It can also be programmed to contact a family member about a missed dose.  Of course, there are limits to the utility of any automated device, as the client must still have the capacity to follow the directions and not simply discard the dose. 

It will be interesting to see, over time, whether (and which kind of ) Tobors are effective innovations with long-range satisfaction and utility.  I do seem to have a lot of ignored contraptions on my own kitchen counter.