Pharmaceutical drugs expiry date tracking: A visionary approach

Abstract

SummaryEvery drug manufacturer is legally bound to display the expiry date on all pharmaceutical products as medicines may not be safe or as effective after the expiry date. The problem is that any pharmaceutical drug has all the important information such as expiry date, batch no., manufacturing date written on a small corner of the packaging. Once that part is rubbed or torn out while taking a pill from the leaflet or otherwise, there is no way to know that crucial information making that whole drug a complete waste as one cannot take risks with their health. This article proposes a solution to find out this crucial information even after it is lost from the leaflet. Therefore, this research work is focused to design an application (app) based on the features of optical character recognition, database management system, auto‐classification, aiming at helping people to use it with ease. One just need to scan the medicine once and the app will autosave all the required credentials that can be accessed later on by scanning it again. Compared to the existing technologies, this app does not depend on QR code as it can also be torn out while taking any pill.