The Adherence Project
Medicine that meets you halfway.
- Product Design
- Physical Computing
- Accessibility
Voice + screen companion wired to a physical pill dispenser. Soft reminders, swinging door, fewer missed doses.
Half of people with chronic conditions miss doses. Adherence is not a willpower poster. It is a system problem.
This project pairs a soft digital companion with a physical pill dispenser: voice, screen, LEDs, and a door that hands you the dose instead of lecturing you about it.
Project Overview
Client
Concept · Health Hardware (Academic)
Industry
Health · Physical Computing · Accessibility
Timeline
Studio project · Solo
My role
Product, interaction, physical prototype
Insight
Flexibility beats rigid schedules for messy real routines.
Build
ProtoPie + Blokdots bridging app logic to Arduino hardware.
Form
Funnel refill, swinging door dispense, status through an LED window.
Problem
Missed doses, real cost
~125,000 preventable deaths a year in the US alone. The brief: soft reminders and an accessible path from refill to dispense.
Flow
Map the ritual
User flows clarified where voice helps and where it just slows people down. Clarity over speed. Fewer back-and-forths.
Prototype
Digital meets door servo
ProtoPie talked to Blokdots. Loose wires lied. Wi-Fi lagged. Three hardware iterations later, the funnel angle and cable routing finally behaved.
Prototype in motion
Hardware dispense, voice loops, and the finished companion flow.
Finished design
Interaction demo
System walkthrough
Full demo
Reflection
Multi-sensory beats app-only nagging. Voice wants patience. Hardware wants cable management. Next: a tighter industrial design pass once the interaction model stops surprising the servos.