Because healthcare should be accessible to everyone.

Are you having a hard time opening your medicine bottles? For some people, even a task as trivial as opening a pill bottle is becoming a daily obstacle. Although standard pharmaceutical packaging aims to keep medicine safe and secure, it often overlooks one vital aspect: accessibility.

Here at PAXUS, we know that accessing medication should not be such a difficult feat. That is why we're exploring ways to make medical packaging more accessible, intuitive, and user-friendly.

The Problem: When Safety Becomes a Barrier

The standard pharmacy pill containers are built with child-proofing caps to make sure no one accesses their contents accidentally. While such features are crucial, they can prove difficult for the elderly and those with arthritis, tremor, weakened hand muscles, or poor eyesight.

Pill caps that open via pressing, aligning or twisting might need someone to have certain physical skills or vision, which many do not.

And it’s not just the opening process that is the issue – problematic packaging could cause issues with sealing of the container too.

So, the question we ask is: “Why should one have to pick either safety or accessibility?”

We think they shouldn’t have to.

Who We Are: Meet PAXUS

PAXUS is an initiative in human-centred design aimed at improving medical package design to be safe and inclusive for everyone.

As a team, we are passionate about investigating the connection between packaging design and accessibility. We believe that design does not stop at aesthetics and function. Instead, it needs to include people and take into account potential problems they can face.

In our vision, we want to see a world where healthcare essentials are easy to access through packaging that strikes a balance between absolute safety and user-centred design.

Through our research and creativity, we hope to change how pharmaceutical packaging designs are currently perceived.

What We're Working On

Project Overview:

Our project aims to look into various designs of caps used for drug bottles to find out how they pose accessibility problems.

By carrying out field studies and interviewing people with difficulties in using standard designs and packaging, we will try to learn more about their experience.

It is our objective to find possibilities for improvement of the design and material of a cap without losing its child-proof characteristics.

We will try to prove that accessibility and safety can co-exist rather than contradict one another.

What's Next for PAXUS?

That's only the start!

In our future blog posts, we will introduce our work process, our research, and all the difficulties connected to accessible medical packaging.

Through understanding the current design and searching for ways to make it better, we will show you what more inclusive medical packaging could look like.

We cannot wait to tell you about our work.

Welcome to PAXUS, the place where our goal is to make sure that packaging protects all people, not limiting their access to necessary healthcare.

Join us in the next blog post as we start our exploration of accessible medical packaging!

Written by Max Wong