Prescription Packaging Alerts You When Meds Expire

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Emma Hutchings for PSFK 2013-08-07 22:18:40 -0400

If you take more than one medication, it can be difficult to keep track of your drugs' respective renewal and expiration dates. Self Expiring, designed by Kanupriya and Gautam Goel, can help you solve one of those problems. If drug companies implement the expiration-responsive packaging, it could prevent illegal drug sales as well as accidents and fatalities arising from the consumption of expired medications.

Image: Self Expiring

The winner of a Red Dot design award, the packaging graphically displays a "not fit for consumption" message using universally accepted danger signs in regional languages. It is composed of two layers of information, as the foreground contains the medicine label and the background carries a hidden expiration message.

These are separated by multiple sheets of diffusible material through which the ink from the hidden message seeps as time passes. This timing sequence initiates when the medication is packaged.

Image: Michael Chen/Flickr

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This article originally published at PSFK here

Topics: Dev & Design, drugs, health, Health & Fitness, Lifestyle, medicine, packaging, prescription drugs, safety, Tech

PSFK is a Mashable publishing partner that reports on ideas and trends in creative business, design, gadgets, and technology. This article is reprinted with the publisher's permission.