Enhancing pharmaceutical packaging through a technology ecosystem to facilitate the reuse of medicines and reduce medicinal waste

The idea of reusing dispensed medicines is appealing to the general public provided its benefits are illustrated, its risks minimized, and the logistics resolved. For example, medicine reuse could help reduce medicinal waste, protect the environment and improve public health. However, the associated technologies and legislation facilitating medicine reuse are generally not available. The availability of suitable technologies could arguably help shape stakeholders’ beliefs and in turn, uptake of a future medicine reuse scheme by tackling the risks and facilitating the practicalities. A literature survey is undertaken to lay down the groundwork for implementing technologies on and around pharmaceutical packaging in order to meet stakeholders’ previously expressed misgivings about medicine reuse (’stakeholder requirements’), and propose a novel ecosystem for, in effect, reusing returned medicines. Methods: A structured literature search examining the application of existing technologies on pharmaceutical packaging to enable medicine reuse was conducted and presented as a narrative review. Results: Reviewed technologies are classified according to different stakeholders’ requirements, and a novel ecosystem from a technology perspective is suggested as a solution to reusing medicines. Conclusion: Active sensing technologies applying to pharmaceutical packaging using printed electronics enlist medicines to be part of the Internet of Things network. Validating the quality and safety of returned medicines through this network seems to be the most effective way for reusing medicines and the correct application of technologies may be the key enabler

Energy consideration when integrating Blockchain with IoT for anti-counterfeit

Blockchain technology has been growing in popularity after Bitcoin, the first protocol has demonstrated a strong use case of the technology in Finance. Over the years, as the technology develops more and more, other use cases for the technology which basically relies on a distributed ledger database system have been explored in areas like supply chain and Internet of Things, to help in some of the bottleneck which IoT faces, some of the challenges are security, privacy, scalability, etc. This thesis work will consider energy consumption when integrating IoT with the Blockchain for anti-counterfeit purposes. Because there is little public academic information about the integration of Blockchain with IoT, it is very difficult to ascertain quantitatively, the energy requirement in application areas like anti-counterfeit. This thesis work has to qualitatively, rely on projects whitepapers and application documentation when comparing the energy requirement in the integration of Blockchain and IoT used for counterfeit solutions by different projects. Both private and public (open-sourced) projects were considered and resulted in two broad classifications ‘integration by brands using a unique identifier (RFID and NFC)’ and ‘integration throughout a product lifecycle’. Energy need for each project(s) in a class is considered based on the IoT hardware used and the Blockchain generation and consensus which also seems to have an impact on the implementation cost and complexity of the project