A few months ago a sharp 8th grade student named Patrick reached out to me, inquiring about the use of digital watermarks on over-the-counter (OTC) drugs to deliver dose information. He believes this would help reduce the number of dosage error found in pharmacies nationwide. Always willing to help out a budding technologist, Digimarc gladly supported this project. I'm happy to say he received first place in his regionals and is off to the State Science Fair at the University of Illinois very shortly. Nice job, Patrick!

The research project focused on 80 subjects and described how a large percentage of people misinterpret how to take OTC drugs. Patrick also had lots of good data quoted from various sources. He mentioned how deaths from accidental medicine misuse had increased by 350% over the last twenty years and the number of deaths from OTC drugs today exceeds the number of deaths from illegal drugs.

He digitally watermarked a few OTC drug labels that had confusing dosage instructions and provided links to videos that demonstrated. A large number of his subjects preferred that over the printed and sometimes confusing instructions. We agree 100%!