Background: The idea of reusing dispensed medicines is appealing to the general public provided its benefits are illustrated, its risks minimized, and the logistics resolved. For example, medicine reuse could help reduce medicinal waste, protect the environment and improve public health. However, the associated technologies and legislation facilitating medicine reuse are generally not available. The availability of suitable technologies could arguably help shape stakeholders’ beliefs and in turn, uptake of a future medicine reuse scheme by tackling the risks and facilitating the practicalities. A literature survey is undertaken to lay down the groundwork for implementing technologies on and around pharmaceutical packaging in order to meet stakeholders’ previously expressed misgivings about medicine reuse (’stakeholder requirements’), and propose a novel ecosystem for, in effect, reusing returned medicines. Methods: A structured literature search examining the application of existing technologies on pharmaceutical packaging to enable medicine reuse was conducted and presented as a narrative review. Results: Reviewed technologies are classified according to different stakeholders’ requirements, and a novel ecosystem from a technology perspective is suggested as a solution to reusing medicines. Conclusion: Active sensing technologies applying to pharmaceutical packaging using printed electronics enlist medicines to be part of the Internet of Things network. Validating the quality and safety of returned medicines through this network seems to be the most effective way for reusing medicines and the correct application of technologies may be the key enabler.

Medicinal waste due to improper handling of unwanted medicines creates health and environmental risks. However, the re-dispensing of unused prescribed medicines from patients seems to be accepted by stakeholders when quality and safety requirements are met. Reusing dispensed medicines may help reduce waste, but a comprehensive validation method is not generally available. The design of a novel digital time temperature and humidity indicator based on an Internet of Pharmaceutical Things concept is proposed to facilitate the validation, and a prototype is presented using smart sensors with cloud connectivity acting as the key technology for verifying and enabling the reuse of returned medicines. Deficiency of existing technologies is evaluated based on the results of this development, and recommendations for future research are suggested.

During the past three decades a number of theories have been proposed to explain the idiosyncrasies of software development as a team activity. These theories variously relate to: adding more programmers to a late project makes it later (Brooks); the structure of the system mirrors the structure of the organization that designed it (Conway); software modules are a responsibility assignment (Parnas) and one must consider stability and responsibility during dependency analysis (Martin). This paper compares and combines these theories into a coherent model of software development that links software coupling and dependency management with team productivity.As a practical test of this model, the paper then investigates the effects of coupling in two large commercial systems (both measured in person decades of effort). It achieves this by using the VCML Views visualisation technique, developed by the authors, to expose the system wide coupling found in the code and how this coupling develops during the lifetime of a project. It then compares the resultant VCML views with simple attributes of the two projects, such as programmer numbers and programmer productivity to derive a set of important conclusions.In particular, it finds that unmanaged coupling within the code is a good indicator of potential productivity bottlenecks; that the number of programmers on a project is not necessarily a good indicator of programmer productivity; and that the architecture of a software system can radically alter the number of programmers that can effectively work together on a system.

This paper describes a study undertaken to explore how assistive technology in the form of a wrist‐worn device is perceived by older people for whom it has been devised.

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