Applications of Wireless Sensor Networks in Pharmaceutical Industry

Pharmaceutical and healthcare industries are highly regulated industries in each and every nation around the globe. Every nation has a governing body like USFDA, TGA, and M.H.R.A, Schedule-M etc. that assures that the medicines are manufactured under strict guidelines to ensure highest quality of manufactured products. However assuring high quality products requires that the manufacturing facility is monitored 24 x 7 and this monitoring requires the use of high end networking technology. Currently pharmaceutical plants capture this information using a number of scalar sensors that measure temperature, pressure, humidity etc. In some developing nations this sensed information is manually recorded by a supervisor in charge. This often results in data entry errors that need to be addressed. This paper aims at identifying current technologies that can be used by Indian pharmaceutical industries to capture this information and process it in real time to provide the kind of track and trace which so far is not implemented in majority of Indian pharmaceutical companies. We specifically focus on identifying the importance of wireless sensor networks and how it can be implemented in pharmaceutical manufacturing plants.