Case study

MedEase

A low-cost pill box and a packaging system to go with it, designed to make taking medication at the right time the easy thing to do rather than the disciplined thing.

Role
Sole designer; concept later developed by a team
Context
Personal project, Shanghai Jiao Tong University
Built with
Arduino, Processing
Output
Packaging system, information design, product model, app concept, working prototype

The problem

Medication compliance is a stubborn public health problem. When people do not take their medicine as directed, the treatment underperforms and the money spent on it is wasted. The failure is rarely a refusal — it is a scatter of small everyday frictions, and those are designable.

What "on time" actually means

A simplified plasma concentration-time curve after a single oral dose, rising to a peak and decaying, with the effective range marked.
Plasma concentration after a single oral dose, simplified.

Everything in this project follows from one graph. After an oral dose, the drug's concentration in the blood rises, peaks, and decays; it is useful only while it sits inside a certain range. Reading that curve for different dosing intervals shows what keeps concentration in range and what does not.

Overlapping concentration curves at stable intervals, keeping the level inside the effective range.
Stable intervals: concentration stays in range.
Overlapping concentration curves at irregular intervals, with the level dropping below or climbing above the effective range.
Irregular intervals: it does not.

So taking medicine on time is not taking it at the same clock time every day — it is keeping a stable interval between doses. That distinction is invisible on most packaging, and it is the principle the whole product is built on.

Where it goes wrong

Illustration of the everyday problems with managing medication.

It is inconvenient. The instructions on a medicine box are hard to find and written for clinicians. Holding the dosages of several different medicines in your head at once is genuinely difficult.

People forget. They forget the dose, they forget where they put the box, they forget to refill it, and they forget to pack it when they travel. Refilling costs a trip and a wait.

Motivation runs out. Some people have not forgotten at all. Taking a pill is a daily reminder of being a patient, and when the medicine is preventive its benefit is invisible, so the habit quietly lapses.

Who it is for

An older person.
Older adults, who often take several medicines a day and prefer devices that are simple to operate.
A person of working age.
People with a chronic condition, at any age, taking medication on a schedule long-term.
A younger person.
Everyday regular users — daily supplements, and medicines that only work if taken on schedule.

From goals to a system

Brainstorming board of concepts for medication management.

Three goals came out of the research — simplify the management, make the information visual instead of textual, and give people a reason to keep going — and each mapped to a decision:

  • Sort by dose, not by drug. The pharmacy pre-sorts everything a person takes at one moment into a single sachet, following the model PillPack uses. Nothing is left for the patient to assemble.
  • Redesign the packaging and what is printed on it, so the necessary information can be read at a glance.
  • Remind at the right moment, physically as well as on a phone.
  • Keep a record, so the person — and, if they want, a clinician or a carer — can see what actually happened.

Packaging

I worked through four packaging routes before settling on one.

Packaging option one: an individual pack holding one dose.
I. One pack per dose
Packaging option two: packs pre-sorted by time and date.
II. Pre-sorted by time and date
Packaging option three: a strip packed by dosage for a period.
III. Packed by dosage for a period
Packaging option four: a uniform standard package.
IV. Uniform package

The uniform package is what the rest of the system stands on. One standard sachet that a pharmacy can fill and a machine can handle turns a mechanical problem into a tractable one, and it means the box does not have to know anything about the shape of the pills inside it.

What is printed on the pack

A single sachet showing name, date, time icon, pill images and dosage.
Four time-of-day icons: morning, midday, evening and night.
Four times of day, as icons rather than clock times.

Each sachet carries the name, date, time, pills and dosage. Time is one of four icons rather than a printed hour, because people's days differ: printing "8:00" is wrong for anyone whose morning starts later and misleading for everyone else, when what the medicine needs is a consistent gap rather than a particular hour.

The pills themselves are shown as pictures. Unlike a conventional medicine box, you do not have to read anything to know what you are holding.

Front of the redesigned medicine packaging.
Back of the redesigned medicine packaging.
The assembled packaging held in a hand.
Flat expanded drawing of the packaging with dimensions and fold lines.
Packaging drawing.

The system around the box

System diagram: prescription and pharmacy on the clinical side, uniform packaging in the middle, e-pillbox and phone app on the home side.

The device is one part of a chain that starts at the prescription:

Storyboard: medicine pre-sorted at the pharmacy.
Storyboard: the packs are loaded into the MedEase box at home.
Storyboard: the box reads the identity and schedule from the packaging.
Storyboard: at dose time a pack rises out of the box.
Storyboard: the box signals with light and sound.
Storyboard: the record syncs to a phone and watch.
  1. The pharmacy pre-sorts the prescription into uniform packs; the schedule travels with them on an RFID tag.
  2. The packs go into the box, which checks identity and reads the schedule.
  3. At dose time one pack moves up on its own, with a light and an alarm.
  4. The record syncs over Wi-Fi or Bluetooth to a phone or watch, where a clinician or carer can see it if the person wants them to.

Product and app

Ideation sketches of the pill box form and internal mechanism.
Product model of the MedEase box, front three-quarter view.
Product model of the MedEase box, alternate view.
Screens from the companion app: schedule, reminder and medicine information.
Workflow diagram of the app, from reading the box to recording a dose.
App workflow.

The app carries four things: the schedule, the record of what was taken, the timed reminder, and the information about each medicine — the same content as the sachet, kept somewhere you can look it up.

Prototype

Flowchart of the prototype logic, from reading the schedule to dispensing and recording.
Logic.
Circuit diagram of the prototype built with Arduino.
Circuit, built with Arduino and Processing.
The working prototype: a pack is advanced at dose time, with light and alarm.
The working prototype, exterior.
The working prototype with the packs loaded.
The working prototype's internal mechanism.
Circuit demonstration.

Where it went next

The team at the SJTU Interaction Design Lab carried the concept further. They kept the core idea — uniform packaging, sorted by dose, with the schedule travelling on the pack — and replaced the mechanical feed with a non-mechanical solution, putting more work into the structure and moving the interface onto an e-ink screen.

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