Epothecary: cost-effective drug pedigree tracking and authentication using mobile phones

Counterfeit and expired pharmaceuticals are a significant problem in the developing world, constituting up to 80% of stock on pharmacy shelves. This is due both to poor existing controls and to lack of supporting infrastructure on which to build such controls. Existing strategies to fight counterfeiting include holograms, special packaging, and paper invoice tracing, but each of these have been proven ineffectual in the face of increasingly sophisticated counterfeiting rings, which inject fake drugs into the market for profit and/or sell off genuine medications on the black market or in adjacent countries at marked up prices. This paper describes Epothecary, a system which uses built-in functionality in midlevel mobile telephones including cameras, SMS, and optionally GPS to construct a robust system for tracking and verifying the pedigrees of pharmaceutical products at every point in the distribution chain, particularly in the developing world.