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Highly accurate vision systems improve patient safety in pharma

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Mark Hilhorst, CEO of Jekson Vision (a global provider of vision inspection and track & trace solutions), provides insight into the stringent quality checks needed that are crucial to improve patient safety in the pharma market, and how automation solutions can help with this, while meeting growing market demand.

Key insights:

Keeping up with drug development for an ageing UK population and new diseases, particularly zoonotics, is challenging for the pharma industry. Companies need high quality, reliable sorting solutions to avoid bottlenecks in the manufacturing process. Tablets can get damaged in handling and transit and so they require stringent quality checks prior to packaging.

In the time-critical pharma supply chain automated vision systems for sorting and rejecting faulty products, however tiny the imperfection, are many times faster than the human eye and not prone to error. It is essential that the billions of tablets rolling off UK production lines are in perfect condition – one bad shipment could potentially spell disaster both financially and to reputation.

No room for error

To meet the stringent regulations in the pharmaceuticals industry, it is essential to ensure your product is right first time, every time. To help improve patient safety, and avoid triggering fines and delays, the latest automated high-throughput screening solutions for sorting and rejecting inferior pharmaceutical and nutraceutical items are a hygienic and proven method as well as 100% accurate.

When you bear in mind that in the UK market alone, around 6,300 tonnes of paracetamol are sold per year, approximately 4.7 billion individual tablets, it is not unreasonable to expect an accurate and reliable inspection system to weed out flawed items. Major pharmaceutical companies across the globe are already using vision detection and traceability solutions which are ideal for production lines of blister packs or bottles, and are designed to comply with all international quality standards.

Automating the inspection process

Replacing hand sorting methods, vision machines can absorb the tiniest details of a product’s make up – the perfect size, shape, colour, and any markings. The kit then selects and rejects anything, however miniscule, that doesn’t meet the spec such as a broken tablet, the wrong size, a foreign object, a different shape or spoiled product. The system also uses AI learning to further improve its recognition of the correct, versus the reject product, speeding up the process as the throughput increases.

Automated product sorting also brings peace of mind for contract packing companies, either packing into bottles which is more common in the United States, but also blister packs such as those seen in the UK market – actually in the US medicines are 80% bottled and only 20% blister packed, whereas in the UK it is the reverse.

Sorting and removing imperfections prevent issues with the packaging equipment, where faulty or flawed tablets could get stuck in the machinery and stop the production line.

Systems like ours at Jekson Vision can check up to 2,000 tablets a minute. This type of speed driven validation is vital to meet growing market demand. Of course, this kit doesn’t come cheap. However, return on investment is achieved very quickly through significantly enhanced efficiencies.

Most providers’ equipment can be supplied bespoke to a manufacturer’s requirements to suit the production line. Depending on the speed of the operation and the throughput, it is possible to build a vision system into a production line to feed into the packaging station, or into a hopper.

To add further layers of security a biometric User Interface (UI) system can be accessed to promote transparency by ensuring every action is recorded. Changes are tracked to the individual, and access is restricted. This kind of UI can also be activated remotely by the service team for training and resolving any issues.

Sorting tablets by hand is a challenging and laborious task for staff. A vision system stores data to quickly spot imperfections. Cameras have a mapped field of vision and when a reject is spotted, it is tracked to the ‘blow-out’ zone where a puff of compressed air removes the tablet from the line and into the reject tray.

Although the technology is complex, the design is usually simple, and offers a reliable, alternative solution to manual handling for manufacturers or co-packers of tablets, whether medicinal or nutraceutical. It is simply ‘plug in and play’ once attached to compressed air and electricity supplies.

Vision inspection systems, already widely used in the United States – the world’s largest pharmaceutical market – are now available in the UK offering complete solutions across the various stages of packaging.

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