Prevention of Misuse of Prescribed Drugs Using RFID and Blockchain
摘要
The misuse of prescribed drugs poses a threat to public health and safety. This paper proposes a system that combines RFID and blockchain technology to address and counter this issue. Blockchain’s ability to provide transparency, traceability, and accountability helps benefit this system and its participants. The RFID technology incorporated on the other hand helps provide a user-friendly interface to the system, where RFID tags attached to the drug packaging are carried throughout the supply chain and provide basic information transfer through it. The manufacturer is given the vital role of entering all the required information for a new batch of drugs. The manufacturer also enters information about the distributor. The batch must be forwarded similarly to every distributor. Information about the next distributor in the supply chain is provided to the blockchain. This process continues until a given drug packaging reaches the consumer. The governing authority is granted access to the blockchain, where it utilizes its traceability features. The blockchain facilitates verification of origin and legitimacy of prescribed drugs. In conclusion, our proposed system employs RFID and blockchain technology to prevent the misuse of prescribed drugs. With established, role-based permissions; each participant (e.g., manufacturer & distributor) can securely manage the drug data. Secondly, the distributor can unilaterally can- cel drugs that have been compromised thereby ensuring safe distribution. This, in turn, increases transparency and traceability to ensure public health is protected.