Performance of NIR handheld spectrometers for the detection of counterfeit tablets.

Near Infrared (NIR) spectroscopy is an attractive tool for pharmaceutical analyses. While lab spectrometers are very performant, they are expensive and due to their size, not adapted for field analyses. In this study, two handheld NIR spectrometers have been evaluated for the fast detection of counterfeits of pharmaceutical tablets: one low cost sensor providing a short wavelength NIR range (swNIR) and one handheld spectrometer providing a classical NIR range (cNIR).