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Bormioli Pharma, an international leader in the production of glass and plastic containers for pharmaceutical use, today announced the winner of the Call4Ideas launched in collaboration with Desall.com, aimed at revolutionising current child-resistant closure systems for bottles through integrated biometric recognition solutions.

The company’s intention was to explore innovative solutions to ensure greater security of drugs, avoiding accidental opening and protecting the health of patients, especially for pharmaceutical products with high added value. Of all the projects received, Bormioli Pharma preferred those that also included the possibility of connecting the item to electronic devices, aware that the Internet of Things (IoT) is a reality that is getting closer and closer to the world of pharmaceutical packaging.

The winning Turn-It project, presented by a team of industrial designers based in Lima ‒ Micaela Alvarado Eslava, Irvin Tolentino and Cèsar Augusto Lòpez Torres Chicoma ‒ envisages a capsule with integrated biometric recognition which, by reading the fingerprint and a simple rotation of the cap, allows the patient to easily open the medicine. Biometric recognition can also take place via smartphones. The item is in fact designed both to be used independently and to be connected to a dedicated app, which also enables effective monitoring of treatment.

“One of the elements that impressed us most about this project is its essentiality, both in terms of patient experience and in terms of electromechanical interaction”, says Federico Piutti, Innovation Manager at Bormioli Pharma. “At a time when the Internet of Things is becoming more and more pervasive in our lives, even for everyday objects, we believe that solutions like this can generate real interest in the market.”

“Following and managing the conceptual process of Turn-It, from the concept to its validation and prototyping, has led us to the creation of an object with optimal usability and security features,” says Davide Scomparin, CEO of Desall. “Connectivity enriches the user experience by creating a solution with multiple possibilities for application.”

The prototype will be unveiled from 24 to 26 October at CPHI Barcelona, the most important global trade fair dedicated to the drug supply chain.

As in the previous two years, this project is the result of an Open Innovation process that began with an in-house Idea Generation phase, from which briefs emerged that ‒ thanks to the collaboration with the crowdsourcing platform, Desall.com ‒ were submitted to a vast audience of designers from all over the world.

In the same vein, a second Call4Ideas was launched in 2023, focusing on exploring the uses of Augmented Reality in pharmaceutical packaging. As of today, the idea-gathering phase has been completed and in the coming weeks, Bormioli Pharma will proceed with their evaluation, with the aim of suggesting future visions of how AR can be integrated in the pharmaceutical field to the market.