August Faller Presents Interactive Packaging Solutions at CPhI

August Faller announced that it will be exhibiting a range of packaging and labelling solutions for pharmaceutical products at CPhI 2015. The company is keen to show how new packaging technologies can incorporate patient-focused elements.

Pharmaceutical packaging has a role to play in improving communication between manufacturers, doctors, and patients, according to August Faller, especially with advances in Industry 4.0 and the internet. Smartphones, for example, can be used as a medication reminder tool or as a means to reorder prescriptions. Videos can be used to provide information such as the correct use of medication.

One technology that makes this possible is near field communication (NFC), which is an international transmission standard for contactless exchange of data via radio technology across short distances. For it to work, pharmaceutical packaging is stamped with an electronic radio tag, which can be read by any modern Android smartphone. Alternatively, the information can be shared using QR codes on the carton.

NFC technology comes with a safety feature in that every chip is given its own unique serial number during the manufacturing process. It is also possible to provide high levels of safety to patients purchasing their medication online, thanks to easy readability by smartphones. August Faller believes that originality of medication packaging, transport security, and also compliance and convenience can be improved by modern wireless technologies such as NFC.

Another technology is radio frequency identification (RFID), which is particularly useful in industry-related processes such as track and trace.

Source: August Faller, Stand 4C101, Hall 4