Episode 2 — The tablet on Gran's wall. Keeping on top of a parent's eight medicines a day

Saturday morning, twenty past nine. Izabela’s mother-in-law, Joanna, seventy-three, is on the phone: “that pink tablet, the one for my blood pressure — I think I’ve taken it, but I took it yesterday as well, and now I can’t tell if it was twice.” Eight medicines a day, three different consultants, none of them aware of the others. And Iza — two kids, still in her pyjamas, coffee in one hand — is meant to work out whether to say “take the pink one” or “don’t, you might already have”.

This episode is about the sandwich generation and a parent on too many medicines. Tomasz explains why nearly one in two people aged sixty-five and over in England are on five or more medicines a day — a figure that has roughly quadrupled in a generation (Cognitive Function and Ageing Study, England) — and shows a concrete answer: a tablet on the kitchen wall with the moya pteczka app open all day, so an older person no longer has to keep count of their doses. She isn’t ASKING herself whether she took it. She SEES that she has.

Topics:

• Why most answers to this are just an alarm — which does nothing if the older person doesn’t remember to check in the first place
• The tablet as a shared board — a progress bar, colour-coded times, and a status for each dose
• An hour late turns the bar amber; three hours turns it red and marks the dose missed. Those are the values written into the app, the same for every user
• Why it isn’t surveillance: the colour appears FIRST for the older person (the tablet’s on her wall, she walks past first). Family see the very same thing, passively — no midnight texts
• The practical bit: which tablet, where to hang it, how to set it up, and data protection — Joanna’s account is hers, and she invites the family in
• “We don’t take control, we share the view” — the philosophy of the sandwich generation

Materials:

• The moya pteczka app: mojapteczka.pl
• Family view (iOS 1.7.8): ward cards with a daily-adherence bar
• Contact: kontakt@mojapteczka.pl
• Cognitive Function and Ageing Study (CFAS I vs CFAS II), Age and Ageing

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About AI in this episode. The dialogue was written by Tomasz Szuster. The voices you hear are AI-generated synthetic voices — not recordings of the hosts. We say this straight out, because we think it should be the standard for any podcast made this way. Full details in the episode outro.