Isidorey Uses Twilio to Power Smart Pill Packages for Stora Enso

Isidorey Uses Twilio to Power Smart Pill Packages for Stora Enso

 

Isidorey is a device cloud solutions provider that allows embedded devices to connect to the cloud using their platform. They provide a set of tools and APIs that enable device manufacturers to build highly secure, scalable, and connected business applications easily. Isidorey used Twilio for Stora Enso, a global packaging, paper and wood products company, to create a connected pill package that sends compliance information to the Isidorey Device Cloud via the Twilio SMS API. When someone breaks the casing on the pill package, it sends an SMS message to notify a physician or caregiver of the patient’s compliance. We spoke with Kyle Roche, President & CEO of Isidorey, about the SMS Pill Package from Stora Enso.

How does it work?

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Basically, these pill packs have a GSM module in the pack that sends an SMS message through Twilio. Twilio POSTs the message to our device cloud API and the binary parsing is all done on our end. We keep the compliance information about the packs and the correlation between the GSM module, paper pack, SIM card, and patient ID. We are also integrated with Google Health, MDClick and Dossia for electronic health records.

What’s the back story of your project? What problem were you trying to solve?

We’ve been working with a few pharma providers and the vendor that makes the pill packs for quite a while. We’ve moved from NFC packs (relaying from a home gateway or smart phone) to packs that have the ability to transmit SMS data. As soon as we heard SMS, we thought Twilio would be perfect to proxy the data. There are a lot of solutions out there that handle prescription compliance, but most of them work off a home gateway or some type of user intervention. With partnerships in mail order pharmacies and these types of technologies, we can actually fill a prescription and track its lifecycle all the way until re-fill without any additional hardware, software, or user interaction.

Isidorey, in general, provides a cloud platform for embedded devices. Everything from street lights to industrial applications to medical equipment connect their devices to our platform. In some cases, handling SMS is pretty simple, but Twilio gives us the ability to really customize what we’re doing with the messages as they come into the platform.

How did you get started developing with Twilio?

We’ve actually been working with Twilio for quite some time. I co-authored the Twilioforce (Twilio library for Force.com) a few years back while I was at Appirio. We built the OpenVBX AMI for Amazon EC2 and have used Twilio to solve a number of isolated customer requests over the years. After years of leveraging Twilio’s API for various purposes, it became our first thought when we were confronted with this challenge.