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Carlos Lastres1,160 words

Almost a Quarter of Prescriptions for Japan's Over 75s List Seven Drugs or More

When an older person in Japan picks up medicine at a pharmacy, they usually go home with a paper bag of blister packs and a folded sheet of small print explaining what each one is and when to take it. The Ministry of Health's latest statistics say that for patients 75 and over, 23.1% of pharmacy prescription claims list seven or more different drugs.

Seven drugs means seven names, seven doses and seven sets of instructions. All of it printed small, for whoever takes the bag home to read.

I keep coming back to that number, because it is a very concrete version of a question I have been asking for a while. Who reads the small print when nobody else is in the room?

The people holding the paper bag

Japan counted 36.22 million people aged 65 or over on 1 October 2025, 29.4% of the population. Inside that group, 21.27 million are 75 or over. They now outnumber the 65 to 74 group by more than six million.

Eyesight is part of the picture. The Japan Ophthalmologists Association estimated that 1.64 million people in Japan had a visual impairment in 2007, and it projected about 2 million by 2030. It is an old estimate, and I could not find a newer national one. The detail that matters is inside it: 1.45 million of those people had low vision, not blindness. They can see, but the label is hard. Half of them were 70 or older.

That count leaves out the far larger group whose eyes are simply getting older and whose reading glasses are always in another room.

Many of them read it alone

The 2020 census found 6.72 million people aged 65 or over living alone in Japan. That was 15.0% of older men and 22.1% of older women. The national projection in the Cabinet Office white paper puts those shares at 26.1% and 29.3% by 2050.

The scene I keep picturing is a kitchen table, a paper bag and one person trying to work out whether the white tablet is the morning one.

They already carry the camera

The usual assumption is that older people in Japan are offline. The data says otherwise. In the Cabinet Office survey I wrote about in Japan's Over 65s Have Smartphones. 0.3% Use Them to See a Doctor, 84.1% of Japanese respondents over 65 use a phone to keep in touch with family. The drop off comes later, at the point where apps start asking for forms, logins and confirmation screens.

That finding shaped how I think about this. The phone is already in the kitchen. The trouble starts when it asks the person to fill something in.

What Glimpse does at that table

Glimpse Vision AI is an iPhone app I designed and built. You open it, point the camera at something and ask a question out loud. It answers by voice, in the language you asked in. You do not need a wake word, and there is nothing to type or learn.

At the kitchen table that looks like this. Hold the sheet from the pharmacy up to the camera and ask what it says. Ask which of these is taken after dinner. Ask it to read the expiry date on the milk, the letter from the ward office, the tiny buttons on a new rice cooker, the timetable at the bus stop.

It also remembers what you tell it to. Say "remember that the spare key is with the neighbor" or "remember my grandson arrives at three on Saturday" and Glimpse keeps it after the app is closed.

For people who find it hard to hold a phone steady, there are Glimpse Glasses. They are our own glasses: a small camera that takes one still when you ask a question, speakers in the temples so the answer arrives without anything in your ear, and no display in the lens at all. You look at the thing and ask. They connect to an iPhone over Bluetooth and cost $150 once, with no subscription for the glasses.

Glimpse was not designed as a product for older people. It started with menus in Tokyo and plants I could not name. The more time I spend with these numbers, the more I think older people might be the people it fits best, because the whole design idea was to remove the interface until only the question and the answer are left. I wrote about that in How I Built Glimpse Vision AI.

What it is not

  • Glimpse is not a medical device. It can misread a word, especially on a crumpled label in bad light. For anything about a dose, the pharmacist and the printed instructions are the authority. If an answer sounds wrong, call the pharmacy.
  • It does not replace an eye exam. If someone is suddenly struggling to read, that is a reason to see an ophthalmologist first.
  • It does not replace a person. A voice that reads a label is useful, but it will not keep anyone company or look after them.
  • It needs an iPhone and a connection. The free plan gives 5 minutes a day, which is enough for a few labels and letters. Glimpse Pro gives 40 minutes a day. The glasses need the iPhone app too, and there is no Android version.

Those limits are real. I would still rather a person living alone had a second pair of eyes that answers out loud than a magnifying glass and a guess.

If you want to try it with a parent

My advice is to set it up together, in person, the first time. Install the free app, point it at something from their own kitchen and let them ask the first question themselves. The first answer is what convinces people, and it convinces them much faster when the question is theirs.

The app is free on the App Store and works in Japanese, English and Spanish. Everything else, including the glasses, is on glimpseai.jp, with a Japanese version you can send to family.

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