PoAV-Based QR Code Blockchain Technique for Counterfeit Medicine Detection and Performance Validation

Abstract

The problem of counterfeit drugs remains a constant threat in the pharmaceuticals industry due to identity, handoff, and record fragmentation across various organizations. Also hard for the end users to verify their identities instantly. In this paper, a new blockchain framework is proposed with QR-coded identity of medicines and Proof of Authentic Validation (PoAV) as a custom consensus along with a Trans-Evaluator layer for mutual validation of the block. The system will be recording on-chain events related to registration of products, transfer of ownership, compliance event occurrence, and drug recall notices while keeping an extendable metadata of the medicines off-chain via a content hash link mechanism. Contrary to existing approaches based on centralizing metadata storage or costly public blockchain validation, the proposed architecture stresses on instant verification, efficient computation power, and access for end users. The implementation of the framework uses smart contracts for registration, roles, auditing, quality assurance of products, and drug recalls. Validator selection is made via scoring policy that is dependent on the reputation score, compliance score, role importance, and efficiency of validators for forming the PoAV approval set. The developed framework was prototyped on a permissioned testbed using scalable virtual nodes. The experiment results show perfect QR authentication accuracy for Different scenarios and better validation execution throughput compared to the reference Ethereum, DApp, and BCoT implementations. Besides, our approach shows significantly less CPU consumption and faster confirmation times compared to PoW and PoS mechanisms.