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. 2020 May 29;20(11):3080.
doi: 10.3390/s20113080.

Enabling Medicine Reuse Using a Digital Time Temperature Humidity Sensor in an Internet of Pharmaceutical Things Concept

Terence K L Hui  1 , Parastou Donyai  2 , Rachel McCrindle  1 , R Simon Sherratt  1
Affiliations

Enabling Medicine Reuse Using a Digital Time Temperature Humidity Sensor in an Internet of Pharmaceutical Things Concept

Terence K L Hui et al. Sensors (Basel). .

Abstract

Medicinal waste due to improper handling of unwanted medicines creates health and environmental risks. However, the re-dispensing of unused prescribed medicines from patients seems to be accepted by stakeholders when quality and safety requirements are met. Reusing dispensed medicines may help reduce waste, but a comprehensive validation method is not generally available. The design of a novel digital time temperature and humidity indicator based on an Internet of Pharmaceutical Things concept is proposed to facilitate the validation, and a prototype is presented using smart sensors with cloud connectivity acting as the key technology for verifying and enabling the reuse of returned medicines. Deficiency of existing technologies is evaluated based on the results of this development, and recommendations for future research are suggested.

Keywords: IoT; TTI (time temperature indicator); intelligent pharmaceutical packaging; internet of pharmaceutical things; medicine re-dispensing technologies; medicine reuse; reduce medicinal waste.

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Conflict of interest statement

The authors declare no conflict of interest.

Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
Typical IoPT architecture for medicine reuse derived from the ReMINDS ecosystem [9].
Figure 2
Figure 2
Block diagram of a dTTHI for medicine reuse based on the IoPT concept.
Figure 3
Figure 3
Hardware assembly of the dTTHI device.
Figure 4
Figure 4
Sequence diagram of a dTTHI for medicine reuse based on the IoPT concept.
Figure 5
Figure 5
On-package display showing the real time quality status of the packaged medicine.
Figure 6
Figure 6
Screen capture of servers launched on Android smartphone.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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