Manufacture and Examination of Breaking Device for Tablet Halves

Among the commercial tablets having breaking lines, there are very hard ones which are difficult to be broken into halves by fingers. A device was designed to make a break such hard tablets into halves easily. The device consisted of four acrylic plates connected with three hinges. The cutting procedure was as follows: (1) place a tablet on a central hinge to make an edge of the upper acrylic plate coincident with a breaking line of the tablet;(2) sandwich each half of the tablet between upper and lower acrylic plates;(3) bend the central hinge down.According to this procedure, the tablet was broken into halves smoothly. Samples from six commercial hard tablets were employed, three of which were considered to be too hard to break into halves by fingers in some hospitals. In comparison with manual breaking, it was found that this device could break hard tablets into halves simply and more exactly. These results suggest that this device for cutting a tablet into halves is very useful tool for the prescription work in hospital pharmacy.