Even one child dying from accidental poisoning would be one too many, so Faraday Packaging Partnership commissioned leading psychologist Dr Belinda Winder at the University of Sheffield and international design consultancy Factory Design to create a number of new patent applied designs of child resistant closures which are now available for licence.
Faraday will launch the new concepts on October 15-16 in Leeds and is keen to open discussions regarding commercial partnerships.
Records show that 80% of recorded accidental poisonings are of children under four years old. Thirty children each year die in the USA as a result of unintentional poisonings from medicines and household chemicals and over 1M calls are made to poison control centres.
A new British Standard for packaging of medicines is to become law for aspirin, paracetamol and iron, according new Government proposals.
Faraday Packaging Partnership commissioned quantitative research into consumer behaviour and attitudes, to understand the problem more fully. The study shows that many existing designs of child resistant closures present further problems to adult users, by being difficult to open.
“The key to our approach is to make the Child Resistant Closures cognitively difficult rather than physically difficult to open,” says Dr Winder.
Numerous ideas were generated at a creative event, from which a dozen concepts were created, ranging from those with a sophisticated interface to simple observations about consumer behaviour.
Of these, six are now being filed for patenting. Adam White of Factory Design says: “The designs use a range of approaches, some simply requiring a slightly larger hand size or the knowledge of how the closure works, and others based on keys or combinations.”