Monitoring Medicine Quality Conservation: An IoT-Based Platform Design

Ambient-sensitive pharmaceutical products can be degraded if exposed to inappropriate temperature, humidity, light or movement conditions. Although most drugs are properly handled in hospitals, once they are dispensed to ambulatory patients, the prescribed environmental preserving conditions are not always met. The present work proposes a global design to support the proper drugs preservation once they are dispensed to the patient. The proposed solution consists of a monitoring network and a servers system. The former is composed by a sensor node attached to the medicament to collect the conservation parameters, and a gateway installed at the patients' home to periodically capture and analyze this data prior to forwarding them to the data server. The servers system processes this information to monitor, in real time, the drug conservation parameters. Whenever any preserving parameter is considered not acceptable, the system will automatically generate an alert to warn the patient and the hospital pharmacy practitioners. Moreover, blockchain technology is adopted to register key information, specifically to immutably record whenever an alert regarding the conservation conditions of the drugs is generated/deactivated. Furthermore, Elliptic Curve Cryptography signatures are introduced to verify the identity of gateways that originate the messages interchanged in the system. Finally, energy efficiency has been considered as a major issue in order to prolong the battery autonomy of the sensor nodes affixed to the dispensed drugs.