{"id":539388,"date":"2026-03-22T23:08:07","date_gmt":"2026-03-22T23:08:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/539388\/"},"modified":"2026-03-22T23:08:07","modified_gmt":"2026-03-22T23:08:07","slug":"iding-counterfeit-drugs-might-be-easier-than-you-think","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/539388\/","title":{"rendered":"IDing Counterfeit Drugs Might Be Easier Than You Think"},"content":{"rendered":"

Odds are, you\u2019ve taken pills before; it\u2019s a statistical certainty that some of you reading this took several this morning. Whenever you do, you\u2019re at the mercy of the manufacturer: you\u2019re trusting that they\u2019ve put in the specific active ingredients in the dosage listed on the package. Alas, given the world we live in, that doesn\u2019t always happen. Double-checking actual concentrations requires expensive lab equipment like gas chromatography. It turns out checking for counterfeit pills is easier than you\u2019d think, thanks to a technique called Disintegration Fingerprinting<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>The raw voltage signal from the sensor is stored as a \u201cdisintegration fingerprint\u201d of particles detected per minute.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s delightfully simple: all you need is a clear plastic cup, a stir plate, and a handful of electronic components \u2014 namely, a microcontroller, a servo, and an IR line-following sensor. You\u2019ve probably played with just such a sensor: the cheap ones that are a matched pair of LED and photodetector. It works like this: the plastic cup, filled with water, sits upon the stir plate. To start the device, you turn on the stir plate and actuate the servo to drop the pill in the water. The microcontroller then begins recording the signal from the photo-diode. As the pill breaks up and\/or dissolves in the water, the swirling bits are going to reflect light from the IR LED. That reflectance signal over time is the Disintegration Fingerprint (DF), and it\u2019s surprisingly effective at catching fakes according to the authors of the paper linked above. Out of 32 different drug products, the technique worked on 90% of them, and was even able to distinguish between generic and brand-name versions of the same drug.<\/p>\n

Of course, you do need a known-good sample to generate a trustworthy fingerprint, and there\u2019s that pesky 10% of products the technique doesn\u2019t work on, but this seems like a great way to add some last-mile QA\/QC to the drug distribution chain, particularly in low and middle-income countries where counterfeit drugs are a big problem.<\/p>\n

We\u2019ve featured pill-identifiers before<\/a>, but machine vision is going to be much more easily fooled by counterfeits than this method. If your problem isn\u2019t worrying that your pills are fake, but forgetting to take them<\/a>, we\u2019ve had projects to help with that, too.<\/a><\/p>\n

Thanks to [Zorch] for the tip!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Odds are, you\u2019ve taken pills before; it\u2019s a statistical certainty that some of you reading this took several…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":539389,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[58],"tags":[97,243],"class_list":{"0":"post-539388","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-medication","8":"tag-health","9":"tag-medication"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/539388","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=539388"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/539388\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/539389"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=539388"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=539388"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=539388"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}