Application of miniaturized near-infrared spectroscopy in pharmaceutical identification

NIRS is a spectroscopic method that propagates near-infrared waves through objects and measures the absorbance by diffuse reflection, users could analyze the composition information of objects based on that. The technology has fast speed and non-destructive analysis features with relatively simple requirements for operators, making it very friendly to non-expert users. Traditional NIRS scanners used in research laboratories are large and expensive, while recently more and more affordable smaller NIRS scanners are appearing, which attract more end-users to buy and use. Besides, pairing the technology with mobile devices (smartphones, tablets, etc.) could get rid of other professional operation problems, and bring much more possibilities to non-expert users in realistic scenarios. We will explore one such use case in this paper with the extension of work by (Klakegg et al., 2018), namely Smart Pillbox for elderly care. We develop a prototype solution consisting of a hardware-software assistance to support non-expert users.