Emergency Pillbox Keychain

We designed a tangible interface especially for people with narcolepsy (a sleeping disorder). For them it's necessary to take their pills because otherwise they experience a lack of concentration, which causes dangerous situations (think of falling asleep while driving a car).

The eventual purpose is to build a 3D emergency pillbox which is accessible everywhere by easily adding it to the keychain so people can take their medication with them wherever they go.

By using the interface (lasercut) we built in Arduino and Grasshopper + Firefly (accessible with Rhinoceros), you can completely adapt the shape to your needs: height, diameter, color and engravings. We set some minimal and maximal settings so the pillbox still fits your keychain (it can't be too big).

Height
You can change the pillbox height from 1cm to 8cm by laying pills to the sensor (Polulu QTR-8; measures whether the sensor is reveiled or not). The higher you put the pills, the higher your box will be (full size).

Width/diameter
The width or diameter of the pillbox can be changed from 1cm to 3cm by a sliding potentiometer.

Color
By using the RGB potentiometers (directly connected in the Arduino code), you change the color. The color is previewed by an RGB LED.

Engravings
By writing your personal information (name, phone number, address,...) on a white paper and scanning it with the webcam, the data will be engraved in the pillbox. This function comes in handy if you lose your pillbox; people can easily reach out to you.

The whole model you designed can be seen in 3D in Rhinoceros and needs to be 3D printed. You can download the Arduino and Grasshoper code from the .zip file.

For us, this project was a huge challenge because we didn't have any former experience using Rhino and Grasshopper. Good luck with it!

Nele Aerts, Laure Bensch and Eva Laenen (Interaction design students at LUCA School of Arts Genk), in collaboration with Fablab Genk.