ATU690 – SnapSlide with Rocky Batzel

Hello, this is Rocky Batzel and I’m the inventor and CEO of SnapSlide, and this is your Assistive Technology Update.

Hello and welcome to your Assistive Technology Update, the weekly dose of information that keeps you up to date on the latest developments in the field of technology designed to assist individuals with disabilities and special needs. I’m your host, Josh Anderson with the INDATA Project at Easterseals Crossroads in beautiful Indianapolis, Indiana.

Welcome to episode 690 of Assistive Technology Update. It is scheduled to be released on August 16th, 2024. On today’s show, we’re super excited to welcome Rocky Batzel, the inventor and CEO of Snapslide and is here to tell us all about how this new way of accessing our medications can be much more accessible to all. Don’t forget listeners, you can always reach out to us if you have a question, a comment, or someone we should have on the show. You can call our listener line at (317) 721-7124 or send us an email at tech@Eastersealscrossroads.org. We always love hearing from you and now let’s go ahead and get on with the show.

Listeners, I want to make sure that you were fully aware of our next full day training. So as you know here at INDATA, one of the jobs is getting the word out about assistive technology. One way we do that is by podcasts like this, but we also do four to five full day trainings throughout the year. Well, our next training is coming up on August 22nd, 2024 from 9 A.M. to 3 p.m Eastern. This training is over innovative assistive technology and it is online only. All that you have to do is register to attend. Now, spots are limited, so do make sure that you go and register for it as soon as possible. I will put a link down to register down in the show notes. And during this day we’ll talk about all kinds of fun stuff including artificial intelligence, robots, internet of things, virtual reality, augmented reality, adaptive control interfaces, and really more importantly than kind of talking about these technologies, we’re going to talk about how they work into the world of assistive technology.

I’ll be doing most of this training and I will tell you I am not an expert on any of these things. Now, I say that in that kind of way. What I mean is you don’t want me building your artificial intelligence systems or teaching your machines machine learning. You will not get very far in that, but I do work in the world of assistive technology and see how artificial intelligence is being used by some of the amazing creators, including our guest today.

So if you’d like to join us for a full day training, get some of those magical little CEUs that you might need for some kind of certification that you still keep or just want to kind of have a little bit of fun or maybe learn how these innovative and emerging technologies are being used in the world of assistive technology, please do join us for our next INDATA full day training innovative assistive technology, which will be on August 22nd, 2024 from 9 a.m to 3 P.M. Eastern. We’ll put a link down in the show notes so that you can go and register as soon as possible. We can’t wait to see you there.

Listeners, medication bottles have these specialty caps to prevent our young ones from accessing the potentially harmful medications inside. And while these are important for safety of the young, they can be challenging to open for older adults and individuals with disabilities. Our guest today is Rocky Batzel and he is here to discuss the SnapSlide, a new lid that can easily be opened with one hand and accommodate individuals and allow them to access their medications and so much more. Rocky, welcome to the show.

Good to be here, Josh.

Yeah, I am looking forward to getting into talking about this, but before we do that, could you tell our listeners a little bit about yourself?

Yes, I’m Rocky Batzel, I’m the inventor and CEO of SnapSlide. I was a medical student, left medical school after a year and started to create things. The inspiration behind SnapSlide was basically my grandmother. She couldn’t get those pesky push and turn bottles open. My mother had to go over and open them for her every day. So I started to think I’m like, “Huh, this is an interesting problem that hasn’t been really solved or evolved much in over half a century.” So I started thinking about creating a simpler mechanical solution to make it easier for those with limited dexterity, strength, and even those with amputations, only the ability to use one arm, be able to access their medications quickly, easy and efficiently.

Nice, very nice. And you led me just right into my next question. What is the SnapSlide and how is it different from the standard caps that we’re all used to seeing?

So SnapSlide is basically a new mechanical operation, a new way to open and close things. It’s kind of outside the box of what traditional closures are. Everybody’s familiar with child-resistant closures. We operate them pretty much every day, whether it’s your medication or your over-the-counter drugs or whatever it is, everywhere around the world’s using them and we’re used to a turn mechanism. Now it needs to be two parts. You got to push and turn or squeeze and turn. So that’s the child resistance aspect of it. You need that two-part, simultaneous motion.

So I noticed, a lot of this came from medical school, that I learned that requires a lot of joint movement dexterity to do that operation, to push and turn something, and requires two hands obviously. So instead of turning something, I wanted a simpler mechanism that requires less muscle movement, less joints, and instead of a turn, I came up with a snap or a slide. You press it down and you slide it out. Notice that linear action is a lot easier than a torque, a turning mechanism. So that’s what led me to kind of go outside the box and figure out how can we make this simple mechanism that people use every day and struggle with easier and simpler to broaden the amount of people that could access their medication.

Oh, definitely. And yeah, just how you describe it, I mean that’s such an easier motion and I mean I know nobody can see us, but I’m sitting here just moving my thumb going, “Wow, that is a whole heck of a lot easier.” And I know with that mechanism it even makes a few other things that can assist as far as maybe even… Can you talk a little bit about how else it assists besides just the moving? I know the cap stays on and dosing and some other things.

So based on the mechanism being able to slide, I noticed during my research, I noticed there’s millions of people out there that could only access, could only use one arm, whether you’re an amputee or 80% of stroke patients have some form of hemiparesis, paralysis on one side of the body and there’s a slew of conditions, neuromuscular nerve damage that prevent you from using two arms.

So how could you open something that requires two arms if you only have one? And we need to be able to operate this with one hand. There’s millions of people out there that can’t access their medication or need to depend on somebody else to do it for a simple task of everyday living. And I thought that was ridiculous and we needed to make a change to do that. So it allows people with one arm to be able to access their medication.

Also, it’s an interesting thing that when you take a cap off, it’s all or nothing, you have that big opening. So a lot of time access to it, being able to meter dose, take out one pill at a time or two and be able to control that, customize it to your own preference of what you want to do. If you’re taking a medication and you need two tablets and I only need one, I want to be able to do that easy. You open it, you have two tablets, you open the slide a little bit more, meter that dose out and I could open it a little bit less to get the one. Just simple stuff like that that a slide is better. It’s not all or nothing.

Requires significantly less plastic also is something I didn’t go into it wanting to do. I thought it’d be nice but I didn’t know how to do it. But just like the planets line up sometimes when you’re inventing something and you’re able to make additional improvements other than the primary one that you’re trying to address, and it’s amazing. Removing threads, if you can imagine a closure that turns, you have these threads on the inside of both the bottle, the neck of the bottle and the cap. And those threads are layers and each layer is a little bit more plastic.

So in order to turn that on, the threads need to wrap around those layers to turn it. So we’re removing threads all entirely because we don’t need to turn something to remove it. And decreasing those layers makes a real low profile and allows us to save upwards of 25% of plastic per unit, which amounts to about 1.5 grams for every prescription vial out there. If you multiply that by 4 billion, that’s a lot of grams of plastic, about 25 million pounds of plastic annually. So it’s another kind of secondary benefit, the plastic savings.

And I love that. I love that you kind of have that sustainability built in there on accident. I would’ve never ever thought of that either. That just how much goes into all the threads and the turning and all those kinds of pieces and parts. Rocky, I got to ask you just because I know our listeners will probably want to ask, are these still child safe for folks to be able to use?

They are child safe. That was one of the big things during the development process. Obviously, pharmaceutical packages need to be child resistant and it requires that objectively you need to have a two-part mechanism, like I was saying before, that push and turn. So we needed to stay within those confines. Whenever you’re developing something, you need to go outside the box and make it better, but you got to stay within what needs to be done from a regulatory standpoint. So we accommodated the two-part mechanisms of press and slide. You got to press down in a certain spot and slide it out. So we have that.

And then there’s a big test you got to undergo for the Consumer Product Safety Commission. It’s take 50 kids, the lowest demographic age is about three years, all the way up to four years and three months, and the proctor gives them the bottle and they have to try to open it. They have five minutes. And if they can’t get it open after the five minutes, proctor gets it back and opens it for them, doesn’t explain how to open it. You can teach a kid to do anything. But just shows them just visually how to open it and then gives it back to them for another five minutes and you run through that whole test and you got to get above 90% that can’t access their medication, can’t access the bottle. And we ran through that test several times on different iterations and passed it every time.

So we have all the regulatory criteria needed and that was one thing we spent a lot of development and time on perfecting that, finding that perfect math between child resistance and easy open. And I found that being able to remove the physical challenge and kind of make it more of a mental challenge is the way to go. You only have to breach a mental challenge once. A physical challenge, you got to breach every single time you access. So that’s kind of one thing I went down, not making it as physically demanding, but more mentally challenging.

No, that’s great. It still keeps it safe for the children, but makes it much more accessible to the folks who actually need to get inside the bottle in order to get their medication. So are you working on one for prescriptions as well as over-the-counter drugs?

Yes, we are. SnapSlide, think of it as a real broad baseline technology. It’s kind of like a new element on the periodic table of closures. So since it is so simple, you can apply it to a wide variety of containers, shapes, sizes. So we’re currently launching right now for prescription vials, the standard amber bottles that you know of that your pharmacist gives you, your label on it for your medication. And also pursuing over-the-counter drugs such as Tylenol, aspirin, those medications that you don’t need a script for. They could just walk into your store whether there’s a pharmacy or a convenience store and purchase it. So we want to be able to, whether it’s a prescription or over-the-counter drug, our goal is to make medication accessible to everyone.

Definitely, definitely. Rocky, you probably have quite a few of these, but could you tell me a story or two about maybe some of the early adopters or maybe some folks’ experience and comments or thoughts on the SnapSlide?

Absolutely. It’s been an interesting ride. When you first create something, it starts with you. It’s just in your head, nobody knows it. So that process is something else. You got to put it down on paper first, file all your protection, and then you’d finally be able to get a prototype and then that’s when you first could go out and show somebody what they think.

So when I first did that, that was like, “I wonder if people are going to, I know my grandmother had a problem, but do other people? What do they think?” And I began to find it’s a universal kind of innate. People do not like whether you’re able-bodied or have some form of disability or just arthritis. It’s a general consensus that everybody sees these push and turn closures as frustrating and challenging. And that was kind of something that put wind at my back to state that, “Oh, I’m not crazy.”

And the more a lot of people telling you, “It can’t be done, you’ll never be able to get this molded, it’ll never be able to scale” all these, you get a lot of naysayers when you invent something. It’s just, I guess it comes with the territory. I’ve grown to just accept it that there are those naysayers out there and you take what they say seriously. You look to see if they have a point and if your gut’s not telling you that they’re right, then you got to keep going and prove it for yourself.

And it’s been since we started from beginning prototypes all the way to fully developed, it’s been a rewarding process to get this into the hands of somebody that has never been able to access their medication before, whether it is because of a disability or trauma, and you give it to them and they’re finally able to do it and when you see them access it’s quite the feeling their face, they’re like, “Whoa, I could do something now.” And the word I keep getting, it’s independence. They don’t have to depend on their caregiver, their mother, their father, their loved one to access their medication for them, they could do it themselves.

And that was something that hit me hard. I never thought of the independence as something. You take for granted that you’re able to do something and not have to depend on people. That was a big thing that I’m like, “Wow, so true. Nobody wants to depend on others.”

So that was something that really was empowering and impactful to me. When I hear that and when you’re given something, when you’re doing something that allows people to, it’s a simple thing, make one element in their life a little better, that’s what makes it all worth it.

Yeah, no, it really does. And as you were kind of talking about, I was thinking about, and I don’t remember what it is, but there’s some bottle of over-the-counter Tylenol, one of those at home that I can never figure out if I’ve pushed down hard enough. Sometimes it just clicks. It never really opens and I’m able-bodied, I don’t have anything with that. It’s just annoying as all get out, Rocky, to try to open that stupid bottle and it’s Tylenol or a pain reliever. So it’s something you kind of need at the time.

So just thinking of getting that at minor annoyance off sounds wonderful, but even more as you said, as a mean of independence, to be able to open up at least that bit of independence so that an individual can do that on their own and sometimes just that little bit can even open their eyes to, “Well, what else can I do independently?” Just that one little piece. Something that we take for granted, and it’s funny, I even heard you describe it as a little piece or a simple thing, but I know building it could not have been a simple thing with all the steps involved in probably different iterations and everything else.

It was not. When you look at it, you’re like, “Oh, this is simple.” And it needs to be simple because it needs to be manufactured at a high rate, lots of volume, low price point, so it needs to be simple, but building it, developing it out wasn’t simple. It took several iterations, a lot of time, a lot of going back to the drawing board, a lot of failures.

Something I didn’t appreciate when I first started. Now hindsight 20/20 when I look back, my God, it makes sense when you invent something, it’s new, it’s different. There’s no blueprint that you could look at that says, “Okay, this is the right interference, this is the right tolerance, this is the right friction you need for this operation.” All of the different micro elements that allow it to function, to maintain child resistance, to allow easy access to elderly or disabled or even able-bodied to be produced at a large scale.

All of those factors need to come into play. And it was sometimes first mold, it comes off, it’s too hard to open. You’re like, “Oh, boy.” You got to increase the interference. Now it’s too easy. Back to the drawing board, just honing it in and you slowly, the key is never give up. You learn. I like to think of mistakes and failures as just learning. You know what didn’t work. So you could remove that from the possibilities and you’re left with less possibilities. So it could be failure is one thing that you know didn’t work, so until you finally find the one, it’s like picking marbles out of a bucket. You want the blue one, there’s a bunch of reds, but every red you get, it’s no longer in there. So your probability of getting it right increases. So that’s kind of how it was. Still frustrating still like, “Oh God, wish I got it on the first one.” But you hone it in, you finally get it, and once you do, it feels good.

For sure. Yeah, nobody ever thinks about all that trial and error that goes into really making something. And yeah, like you said, you’ve got to fail to know what’s not going to work, to know what is going to work, and it would be great if everything worked that first time, but sometimes if you don’t know what can go wrong, you’re just more apt to make something that may have problems down the road. It’s nice to at least get those out of the way in the development phase as opposed to go through the whole production and then suddenly figure out that, “Oh my gosh, now we have to go back to the drawing board.” If you can get all that out the way earlier than it’s a little bit better. Frustrating at the time, but hopefully much more rewarding at the end.

True, true. Exactly. There were a lot of things that I wasn’t even thinking could go wrong. Exactly what you said. I’m like, “What? I didn’t even think of this as even being an issue on the molding side”, but it was. And you’re like, “All right, add it to the list of things” and just fix it until you finally fail so much, you find so many problems that now you know how to do it.

You finally get there and then talking to people, getting other people’s perspective, really listening to others as to what they struggle with, what’s their pain points like the cap not being able to remove. I developed it so there’s only one unit. You open the slider, but slider never removes on there. A lot of people told me, “You know what I hate is me dropping the cap? Cap being removed and now I have the pill to deal with the bottle and the cap. Sometimes I put the cap down or I drop it”, and that was a pain point that I heard from numerous people, even able-bodied. Everybody from man, woman, young, old, several talked about this cap dropping and it was something that I’m like, “Oh wow, that’s interesting. Let’s get rid of that problem.”

An interesting thing, the child resistance aspect, a lot of children don’t necessarily, when they do get into a bottle, it’s not because they breach through the closure necessarily, but it’s because the closure wasn’t put on properly and now they’re just able to open it up. It’s like not even having any blocking mechanism. I thought that was very interesting and that’s why I wanted to make, I’m like, “How do we prevent that from happening?” So that’s the auditory snap. The snap in SnapSlide. I want to make that crisp auditory sound to know that it’s locked so there’s no mishaps. You know.

Yeah, no questioning, no continuously pushing on it or making sure no having to put that physical effort in there. So Rocky, what are the next steps? Where are you in development? I know you said you’re working on the prescription bottles, but is this something we might be able to see out pretty soon or do you have a date or anything like that?

Yep. So we’re currently revving up production right now. Since we launched earlier in May, May we did our first launch to reveal what we’re doing. We’ve been on stealth mode for the past several years, developing it out, talking to pharmacies, talking to customers, figuring out the perfect logistics through the supply chain. So we were doing all that work and we got to the point that, “Okay, we got all those I’s dotted T’s crossed.” Working with launch partners for fulfillment, and now we have all those elements in line. So now we’re revving up production tooling to be able to launch it nationally for the world.

My plan is if everything goes according to plan, we’re always going to have these issues come up. It’s almost impossible not to, but sometime in Q1 plan to have production up and running and fulfilling our initial launch partners then, so very soon. The demand has been incredible since we launched our social media. The consumers embracing it. You get more people expressing their problems. I love seeing the messages. It’s been pretty rewarding. So moving as fast as we can to get it out.

For sure. That is excellent. Kind of in the meantime, if our listeners want to find out more about SnapSlide, about you, about everything going on, what’s a great way for them to do that?

Go to our website, snapslide.com, join the movement. We have a pretty cool join the movement page that we’ve been getting a lot of traffic to. It’s simple, almost like a petition. Couple questions, optional if you want to put your email and we’ll keep you abreast of everything that’s going on. Do that. Social media, Facebook, SnapSlide S-N-A-P-S-L-I-D-E. Like, follow us. We have a of good posts. We always keep our followers up to speed on everything and do this messages. We always get back to you. We want to know your thoughts, want to know how we could improve things. And just like to, like I said earlier, the more we hear from the consumers out there, the more we could hone in on optimal solutions to everything and really disrupt this industry and make a change that’s been kind of not happening for over 50 years.

Very, very true. Well, Rocky, we’ll put all that information down in the show notes so that folks can easily get to it. Thank you so much for coming on the show today, for telling us Snapslide, and how it can just help just absolute tons and tons of individuals with something that there just hasn’t been another method to really access in at least my lifetime and in most folks’ lifetimes. So really something that’s really solving a need that I know a lot of folks had a barrier with. So thank you so much for coming on and telling us all about it.

Definitely, definitely an overlooked problem. I’m planning on changing that. That’s the mission.

Awesome. Well, we thank you for doing it and thanks again for coming on.

Hey, appreciate it, Josh.

Do you have a question about assistive technology? Do you have a suggestion for someone we should interview on Assistive Technology Update? If so, call our listener line at (317) 721-7124. Send us an email at tech@eastersealscrossroads.org or shoot us a note on Twitter @InDataProject. Our captions and transcripts for the show are sponsored by the Indiana Telephone Relay Access Corporation or InTRAC. You can find out more about InTRAC at relayindiana.com.

Special thanks to Nicole Prieto for scheduling our amazing guests and making a mess of my schedule. Today’s show is produced, edited, hosted, and fraught over by yours truly. The opinions expressed by our guests are their own and may or may not reflect those of the INDATA project, Easterseals Crossroads, our supporting partners, or this host. This was your Assistive Technology Update. I’m Josh Anderson with the INDATA Project at Easterseals Crossroads in beautiful Indianapolis, Indiana. We look forward to seeing you next time. Bye-Bye.