An inspection system for pharmaceutical glass tubes

Abstract: Syringes, vials and carpules for pharmaceutical products are usually made of borosilicate glass. Such containers are made by glass converting companies starting from single glass tubes. These glass containers can suffer from inclusions, air bubbles, stones, scratches and others issues, that can cause subsequent problems like product contamination with glass particulate or cracks in the glass. In recent years, more than 100 million units of drugs packaged in vials or syringes have been withdrawn from the market. As a consequence pharmaceutical companies are demanding an increased delivery of high quality products to manufacturers of glass containers and therefore of glass tubes. An automatic, vision based, quality inspection system can be devoted to perform such task, but specific process features requires the introduction of ad-hoc solutions: in the production lines tubes significantly vibrate and rotate, and the cylindrical surface of the tube needs to be inspected at 360 degrees. This paper presents the design, the development and the experimental evaluation of a vision system to control the quality of glass tubes, highlighting the specific solutions developed to manage vibrations and rotations, obtaining a 360 degree inspection. The system has been designed and tested in a real facility, and proved effective in identifying defects and impurities in the order of tens of microns

A Social-Feedback Enriched Interface for Software Download

Software downloading over the Internet is a major solution for publishers to deliver their software products. In this context, user interfaces for software downloading must be designed carefully. They should provide usable interactions and support users when deciding whether to accept the software product or not. This work proposes to enrich a common browser interface for software downloading with a reputation system - a mechanism for collecting and presenting user feedback. The reputation system is assessed with a usability study. The authors’ results show that positive user rankings are effective in increasing user download acceptances for well-known publishers and common name publishers, as well as in increasing acceptance motivations related to trust aspects. In addition, the presence of the reputation system reduces incoherent user behaviors