The Pill Popper

For people who can remember to accessorize but can’t remember to take their pills

I made this project in a class called Designing the Absurd. This project is part of a series of works around visualizing invisible disability. For someone with ADHD for example, what may look like laziness might actually have taken them a lot of effort. Taking three days to send a response to an email could make it seem like they don’t care, but it might have taken all the energy they have to sit down in front of the computer, and hours to write a few simple lines. Invisible disabilities do not present themselves so openly, and people struggling with them are often not accommodated or understood because of that.

This wearable makes needing help remembering to take a pill cute and fun. It creates an aesthetic around invisible disability, as an attempt to destigmatize having to take medication.

The pulley mechanism is designed with hand kinematics in mind.

To avoid accidental triggering of the pill compartment, only a specific line of pull will pop open the compartment (both wrist extension + finger extension required). This motion is less likely to happen naturally with normal daily movement, so compartment doesn't pop open from regular hand motion.) Using hand kinematics alone means the compartment stays secure, but also requires little thought or effort to open.

You can see below that extension of the wrist puts tension on the elastic, but only the defined motion will trigger opening