This pill bottle is a fortress

Johns Hopkins engineering students took a hammer to a pill bottle recently, but it wasn’t just stress relief during finals week.

The quartet of mechanical engineering students broke out the hardware to test the prototype of a new kind of tamper-resistant pill bottle. It’s designed to make sure prescription drugs only get to the people they’re meant to treat.
The 9-inch-tall bottle requires a fingerprint scan to access, and also dispenses the pills one at a time. It has enough room for about 60 tablets of OxyContin, which is about a month’s worth of the painkiller. A pharmacist can refill the bottle by opening a lock at the bottom of the bottle.

The team of students were challenged to create the device by professors at JHU’s Bloomberg School of Public Health. Pills account for more than one-third of drug overdose deaths nationally each year.
Team members included Megan Carney, Joseph Hajj, Joseph Heaney and Welles Sakmar, all of whom recently graduated from Hopkins. They also tested the bottle’s resistance with a drill and screwdriver.