TRAINING AND DEVELOPMENT Design development
Aaron Lord addresses Healthcare Estates 2025, with IHEEM CEO, Pete Sellars, watching on.
(covering two doses per day for a full week) and automatically moves to the correct compartment at the scheduled time. This removes the need to remember which pills to take and when which therefore reduced the chance of the elderly missing doses.
Who or what inspired your idea for Autopill?
My grandparents health problems was my biggest inspiration for Autopill. My grandmother had been diagnosed with dementia, and my grandfather had a heart attack. Through noticing the problems they faced of finding it difficult
to remember to take their pills and needing a reliable system to monitor their health – I wanted to create something to tackle there and countless other elderly members problem.
What did your design and development process look like for the project?
At first, I designed the outer shell of Autopill as I wanted to get an idea of how Autopill would work and how it would look to the user. I also knew that as this was the most experimental part of the process of making and I couldn’t make any estimations how long it would take so by
doing it first would mean that I wouldn’t be rushed for time. Then after designing the outside, it was time for coding. I didn’t know how to code at all so this took an extremely long time but after a while and help from school I coded it to work. assembly was the last part, and with only a week left before submission, I pulled multiple all-nighters 3D printing the parts, glueing, fitting electronics, tearing apart Autopill when the electronics within failed. Yet after many, many hours of trial and error, it was ready.
Did you encounter any challenges or unknowns during your process - if so, what were they, and how did you tackle them?
The main challenge I encountered was where should I put the pill loading mechanism, as this was a large feature that would take up a lot of room on the product so I had to design every
other feature around it. Aaron Lord, 2025 Young Engineer of the Year
There were countless challenges which I had to learn how to overcome whilst designing Autopill, yet early in the development, the main challenge I encountered was where should I put the pill loading mechanism, as this was a large feature that would take up a lot of room on the product so I had to design every other feature around it. I had two main options either to place the loading system on the back where it would be out of view and allow for a much
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