A smart cap for the pharmacy bottle you already own
The pill cap that texts your sister.
It is Thursday, 8 p.m. A bottle sits on a kitchen windowsill, unopened. In another city, a phone buzzes once. That is the whole product.
What happens at 8 p.m.
Most reminders go to the person who forgot. Ours goes to someone who is looking at their phone.
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7:59 p.m.
The cap waits.
It counts nothing else.
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8:00 p.m.
The lid turns, or it does not.
If it turns, the ring lights and nobody is told. If not, the cap allows twenty minutes for the news.
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8:20 p.m.
One text, to one person.
It did its job. Now your sister does hers.
- Intended use
- To notice whether a bottle has been opened by a chosen time and, if not, to text one chosen person. Complete list.
- Who it is for
- Anyone who opens a bottle on a schedule, and one person who would like to know. A sister, 61 percent of the time. Once, a landlord.
- Contraindications
- A sister who does not pick up. The cap sends one message, never a sterner one.
- Setup in three steps
- Screw it on. Text the code inside the cap with your time and your person's number. They reply YES. No app, because we could not think of anything to put in it.
- Battery
- One CR2032 coin cell. Fourteen months at one check a day, measured as fourteen months and six days in a drawer.
- Cleaning
- Damp cloth. No dishwasher. It survives a splash and resents a soak.
Instructions for use
The text is the whole product. The leaflet is the whole company.
People ask us for the long version. This is the long version.
What it does not do, in four lines
It knows whether a lid turned. That is the whole résumé.
There is a wrist device that tracks 41 things about your body and, at the end of the day, tells you to sleep more. We did not build it.
- It does not know what is in the bottle. A jar of buttons gets the same attention.
- It does not measure your body. It has no idea you exist until the lid turns.
- It does not talk to you. It talks to the one person you chose, on the one night it has something to say.
- It does not connect to anything. No dashboard, no streak. We asked around. Nobody wanted to share their lid history.
A Thursday in Sacramento
Gail keeps her bottle on the windowsill, between a jade plant and a jar of pens. Her daughter Ruth, in Denver, called at 8:15 every night to ask. That was not a question. It was a review.
Since February, Ruth's phone has buzzed four times at 8:20. Each call took eleven seconds, and then they talked about the news.
The other 236 evenings, nobody was anybody's alarm clock.
Not a medical device.
It does not diagnose, treat or monitor anything, and it makes no claim about your health. We would print that even if nobody made us.
Our aisle prints it in six-point type under the barcode. We print it on the front, the same size as our name.
The cap never touches you. It touches a bottle. A lid is outside the body, which turns out to be a restful place to do business.
Five questions people ask before they order
- Will it fit my bottle?
- If it is the amber pharmacy bottle with the white lid, yes. Blister packs, no. Organizers with seven little doors, no.
- What if I open it and take nothing?
- The cap believes you. It sees a lid, not a pill. A machine that sees pills costs more than a car.
- What does the text say?
- Mom's bottle wasn't opened by 8. Oakum. The longest we have sent was 57 characters, for a bottle registered as Grandmother Josephine.
- What if Mom does not want to be watched?
- We agree with her. The cap tells one person one thing, once, and keeps no record. The nightly phone call was the surveillance.
- What does it cost?
- 89 dollars, fourteen months of texts included. Then 24 dollars yearly. We want a nightly relationship with a lid, not a monthly one with you.
One cap, on the windowsill by Thursday.
Gail's bottle is still on the sill, between the jade plant and the pens. Order today and the cap posts tomorrow, battery in, leaflet folded.
If your sister does not pick up, choose someone who does. The cap will wait.