BACKGROUND Serious medication errors are common in hospitals and often occur during order transcription or administration of medication. To help prevent such errors, technology has been developed to verify medications by incorporating bar-code verification technology within an electronic medication-administration system (bar-code eMAR). METHODS We conducted a before-and-after, quasi-experimen...

We investigate the problem of decoding bar codes from a signal measured with a hand-held laser-based scanner. Rather than formulating the inverse problem as one of binary image reconstruction, we instead determine the unknown code from the signal. Our approach has the benefit of incorporating the symbology of the bar code, which reduces the degrees of freedom in the problem. We develop a sparse...

The development in the late 1980s of two dimensional bar code symbologies capable of storing kilobytes of information in a single symbol and unlimited data in multiple symbols has led to the suggestion that bar code could be used as a medium for transmitting EDI messages. This paper considers whether such a suggestion targets any real business problem and whether such a system would work in pra...

Existing methods for bar code signal reconstruction is based on either the local approach or the regularization approach with total variation penalty. We formulate the problem explicitly in terms of change points of the 0-1 step function. The bar code is then reconstructed by solving the nonlinear least squares problem subject to linear inequality constraints, with starting values provided by t...

We analyze a variational method for reconstructing a bar code signal from a blurry and noisy measurement. The bar code is modeled as a binary function with a finite number of transitions and a parameter controlling minimal feature size. The measured signal is the convolution of this binary function with a Gaussian kernel. In this work, we assume that the blur kernel is known and establish condi...

Conceivably one of the most successful technologies in the history of retail supply chain has been bar code identification along with the Universal Product Code (UPC) symbology and numbering system (Larurer). The first item with a UPC bar code, taken to a cashier for scanning by a customer, was a 10-pack of Wrigley’s Juicy Fruit chewing gum. It happened on June 26, 1974, at Marsh’s supermarket ...

A method for reading a four-state bar code, using raster-scanned images is described. Documents are prebar coded with one-dimensional four-state bar code that has the free location and no more than 5 degrees inclination. Using raster-scanned images captured by optical character recognition (OCR) equipment, the location and orientation of this bar code is detected and decoded to 20 data characte...

By most accounts (1 ), the development of bar code technology is credited to 2 graduate students at Drexel University. In 1948, Bernard Silver had overheard the president of a local grocery chain asking a dean at the University whether they could develop a system to read product information at checkout. Silver told his colleague Norman Woodland of this request. After one failed idea involving u...