A cognitive approach to a child-safe and elderly-friendly bottle cap design

Abstract

Child-resistant caps (CRC) are well-known as a solution to create a child-resistant barrier for bottles with toxic chemicals inside such as bleach or turpentine. The problem of intoxications with children however still exists. The problem lies in the fact that the real reasons of intoxications are not being tackled. Almost every CRC on the market today is a force-based design. Meaning that the force required to open the caps is high, a force so high a child is not able to open the caps. This statement is true, but only for the caps that are sold in the stores. After the first use, the caps are often not placed back with the same amount of force at which the cap was released from the bottle. Then, the child still only needs little force to open the cap and take a sip of the liquid inside the bottle. In other cases, intoxication occurs while the cap is separated from the bottle. In an unguarded moment, the child simply grabs the bottle and the inevitable occurs. Next to the problems of intoxications is the fact that any adults seems to have a bad experience and therefore trouble with opening any CRC. It takes too much force for any healthy adult, let alone people with physical limitations in hand force and dexterity such as people with rheumatism and elderly. The aim for this project has been to create a cap design which could be opened by people with physical limitations, next to still being child-resistant. The new cap design aims to no longer try to solve the problem of intoxications with children by creating a force-based child-resistant packaging, but looking at the problem differently.