Smartrac, an Avery Dennison company, and blockchain startup SUKU, have announced a digital verification product to authenticate COVID-19 testing kits and personal protective equipment (PPE). The NFC-powered platform enables instant verification of authenticity and provides end-to-end supply chain transparency.

By equipping COVID-19 test kits and PPE with Smartrac’s CIRCUS NFC tags, the solution utilizes Avery Dennison’s Digital Identity Platform to feed tag data to SUKU’s blockchain-based supply chain application. The data from the mobile engagement then confirms the authenticity and provenance of the tagged product, reassuring customers and ultimately increasing trust. Customers can also view their purchase price of PPE compared to the global average, providing transparency to help in the fight against price gouging.

The test kit solution allows organizations to access real-time data from test kit results to make informed decisions on the allocation of doctors, facilities and resources. By opening a communication channel with healthcare officials, the solution will also provide patients with guidance on appropriate behavior in case of a positive test result.

“By combining Avery Dennison’s Digital Identity Platform and Smartrac’s NFC technology with SUKU, we are enabling true transparency for users of COVID-19 testing kits and PPE. Pairing each physical item with a unique digital identity enables visibility of where the items are being distributed, helping healthcare providers, governments and consumers make better, faster decisions based on access to real-time data,” says Francisco Melo, VP/GM, Avery Dennison Intelligent Labels.

This product is among the latest contributions from Avery Dennison companies globally, which are helping the supply chain to respond to the COVID-19 pandemic with advanced product development and increased manufacturing capacity, especially for essential medical and health-related products.

“As providers around the world are working to quickly expand the availability of PPE and tests for COVID-19, it’s important to build technology that’s easy to adopt. Our goal is to offer a simple solution that doesn’t require complex systems integration, providing the right transparency, provenance, supply availability, and real-time data needed using NFC tags enabled by the SUKU Blockchain,” explains Yonathan Lapchik, CEO, SUKU.

High performance is essential to ensuring read reliability of the tag throughout the supply chain. Smartrac’s CIRCUS inlays and tags with NXP’s NTAG213 chip are designed to suit applications where small size and high performance are critical. They offer 144 bytes of user memory, and come with unique ID (UID) mirror functionality, which enables the chip serial number to be mirrored as part of its encoded URL address. This feature allows every tag to be seen and read as unique from the application perspective, without requiring users to encode inlays with different numbers.