EIC Accelerator Report Card: The HabLab's Medication Buttons

Forgetting pills is one of the most ordinary reasons medical treatment fails, and Klikkit was built around a simple fix: a coloured button stuck to the pillbox that beeps when a dose is due and is pressed once the dose is taken. Each press is logged, so a nurse or home-care organisation can see on a dashboard who took what, and when. The HabLab ApS, a Copenhagen company set up to carry the product out of LEO Pharma's innovation unit, won an EIC Accelerator pilot grant in March 2020 to turn it into a tool for care organisations looking after elderly patients at home.

The European Union paid €960,529.50 of the €1,372,185 project, which ran from 1 August 2020 to 28 February 2022, according to CORDIS. The company's own annual accounts at the Danish Business Authority tell what came after: costs scaled down in 2022, the capitalised development written down to zero in 2023, and no employees in the two financial years since.

A Registered Company With No One Working in It

The HabLab still exists. The Danish register shows it as active at Guldblommevej 3 in Kastrup, with Cristiano Riccardo Cairo as director and a three-member board, according to North Data and estatistik.dk. Both list its industry as business and management consultancy, not medical technology. Its latest accounts, for the year to 30 June 2025, were approved on 31 October 2025 and published in December 2025. They report an average of zero employees, no staff costs, a profit of DKK 54,273 and equity of DKK -9,130,745, according to the 2024/25 annual report. The year before also showed no employees.

The product's website, justklikkit.com, still loads a home page that describes the service, but in October 2026 its security certificate had expired, its other pages returned a database error, and its footer read "Copyright © The HabLab 2022" with the old Silkegade address. No news, customer announcement or product update from the company after 2022 could be found. Because the company is still registered and filed its latest accounts in December 2025, this article classes it as active, although it has had no staff and no visible operations since mid-2023.

The Technology: A Button Instead of an App

Klikkit began inside LEO Innovation Lab, which described itself as an independent unit of the Danish dermatology group LEO Pharma. It launched the button and a phone app on Kickstarter in May 2018, with Cristiano Cairo as chief executive, according to a launch release reprinted by BioSpace. The release pitched it to people with chronic illness and leaned on behavioural science: pressing the button was meant to close a "habit loop", an action-and-reward cycle that strengthens routines. The startup database The Hub describes The HabLab as a spin-out from LEO Pharma in 2018.

The EIC project shifted the target from individual patients to care organisations. The CORDIS objective describes Bluetooth buttons, a hub that works "like an internet router" and a software platform that could feed adherence data into "any health management solution". Most pill-reminder products are apps, alarms or smart pill dispensers. Klikkit's argument was that a button needs no phone skills, can be stuck on any part of a treatment, from an inhaler to a water bottle, and gives carers a record of each dose. During the project the hub and the patient's phone app were replaced by a dedicated Klikkit screen, and the buttons were redesigned with louder alarms and a firmer press for elderly users, the periodic report says.

Earlier field tests had exposed the weak point of the phone-based design. In a three-month study with four Danish pharmacies that ended in summer 2020, 17 patients were given Klikkit, and 10 used it correctly; most of the incomplete cases came down to Bluetooth problems on Android phones, according to a project summary written by Klikkit with a Danish network for pharmacy practice development and published on the website of Pharmakon. Pharmacy staff said the dose-by-dose data gave them a much better picture than purchase records. The summary says these findings fed into a version of Klikkit due to be finished by the end of 2020.

What the EIC Project Promised, and What the Record Shows

The European Commission's list of selected companies names The HabLab ApS of Copenhagen, project Klikkit, grant only, among the bottom-up winners of the 20 March 2020 EIC Accelerator pilot cut-off. No other company is listed for the project, and CORDIS shows The HabLab as the sole beneficiary. The grant agreement was signed on 16 July 2020.

The project's final periodic report, covering May 2021 to the end in February 2022, describes work on the first work package: care-home research, new dashboard and app designs, a new button generation, the new patient screen and a security penetration test, integrated into "a prototype that will be piloted". On the second work package, the large-scale pilot, it lists only preparation: a protocol with intervention and control groups, a data-handling agreement for the ethics committee, contract terms with the charity Caritas and the system set-up. It gives a 38% adherence improvement as a result of earlier "clinical studies", and a 60% cut in nurse visits as something the company "believe[s]" Klikkit can achieve.

The Results in Brief page, last updated in August 2022, goes further: it says the solution "was tested in a large-scale pilot study in Portugal" that showed a 38% increase in treatment compliance and a 60% reduction in patient visits. The two CORDIS documents do not agree on whether the pilot had run by the end of the project. No study, protocol registration or partner announcement of a Portuguese pilot could be found, so the 38% and 60% figures rest on the company's own statements.

1. New button hardware for elderly usersDeliveredReported on CORDIS; the button and screen appear on the product site.
2. Patient screen and carer dashboardDeliveredDescribed in the periodic report and on the product site.
3. Large-scale pilot with CaritasDisputedFinal report: still in preparation. Results in Brief: run in Portugal. No published results.
4. Integration with care organisations' health systemsNot achievedNo integration partner or customer system announced.
5. Commercial roll-out to care organisationsNot achievedNo named customer; staff fell to zero and the product was written off by 2023.

The engineering work the grant paid for appears to have been done: two sources describe the screen, the redesigned buttons and the dashboard. What the grant was meant to lead to, a product in routine use by care organisations, never appeared in public. That makes the project at best partly delivered.

After the Grant: Scaling Down, Then Writing Off

The HabLab grew during the project and shrank right after it. Average staff rose from 5 in its first financial year to 7 in 2020/21, then fell to 5, 1 and 0. In the accounts for 2021/22, signed in December 2022, management wrote that "the company's development phase is over" and running costs had been scaled down, and that it expected positive cash flow "either from a sale of the technology or from a sales breakthrough in existing and new markets", according to the 2021/22 annual report (translated). That year closed with a profit of DKK 1,301,202 and the company's only positive equity, DKK 462,120.

Neither outcome came. The 2022/23 annual report says management had "continued to try to dispose of the company's activities, but without final clarification", and had written its fixed assets down to DKK 0 as a precaution, which cut the result by DKK 9 million after tax (translated). The write-down of intangible assets was DKK 11,039,534, and the year's loss DKK 9,566,022. A going-concern note added that the company had obtained a deferral on its long-term loans, had cut its activities to "very limited" running costs, and aimed to repay its long-term debt by selling its assets during 2024. No sale of the Klikkit technology has been announced.

The Money

The HabLab was financed largely with debt. Its liabilities at 30 June 2023 included DKK 9,074,366 of convertible and dividend-bearing loan notes, according to the 2022/23 accounts. In the 2024/25 accounts an almost identical sum, DKK 9,074,364, is shown as short-term debt to credit institutions, next to DKK 256,503 of subordinated loan capital; the reports do not explain the change of label. Total liabilities were DKK 9,557,560 against assets of DKK 426,815, almost all of it cash and receivables. The Hub says the company raised €2 million in seed funding; the investors behind the loan notes are not named in the filings reviewed for this article.

The accounts do not split out revenue, so how much Klikkit ever sold is not public. The gross profit figure in Danish small-company accounts combines sales, other operating income such as grants, and external costs; it peaked at DKK 5,578,023 in 2021/22, the last year of the EU project, and has been close to zero since. The 2024/25 accounts also show the company is part of a Danish joint-taxation group whose administration company is CRC Consulting ApS.

Why Europe Should Care

The problem Klikkit targeted has not gone away. The Commission's European Care Strategy of 7 September 2022 asked member states to expand home and community care and to "roll-out accessible digital solutions in the provision of care services", in a sector it describes as short of workers. A tool that lets fewer home-care staff keep track of more patients' medication fits that agenda closely, and Klikkit was an early, European-built attempt at it.

But the case also shows the limit of a grant for a product whose buyers are public or charitable care providers with slow procurement. The HabLab finished the hardware the EU paid for, then ran out of road before any customer base or buyer appeared, and the work financed partly by EU money now sits at zero on its balance sheet.

The Verdict

The HabLab has not been asked for comment for this article. It is based entirely on public records, company statements and EU project data, linked throughout.