1: Blood Pressure Cuff
If you call your doctor with a medical complaint like shortness of breath or chest pain, their first question will be: what are your vital signs?
Before blood pressure cuffs existed, you needed a nurse or physician to take your vital signs. Now, you can do it on your own if you have one of these at home.
Getting your vital signs over to your doctor can help them understand how serious your issue might be – is it something serious and you need to be seen immediately, or is it nothing to worry about?
2: Pulse Oximeter
Many learned about how important a pulse oximeter is during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Here’s why they’re so important: shortness of breath is a common problem patients call their doctors about. Breathlessness can occur for medical reasons like asthma and COVID, but it can also occur from things like anxiety.
Having a pulse oximeter on hand will help give your doctor an objective measure of whether or not this could be coming from a medical issue or something else.
3: Daily Pill Organizer
While a daily pill organizer might not seem like a piece of medical equipment, it’s vitally important to your health: 25% of hospital visits among older adults relate to medication problems.
A daily pill organizer helps prevent this. Not only does it enable you to pour your pills for the week, but it can also indicate if you haven’t taken your medication yet (because it’s still there) or that you already have (because it’s gone).
There are so many great tech-savvy versions on the market. At the very least, we recommend having a basic one that is less than $5 on Amazon.