As Internet connectivity gets embedded into everything from baby monitors to industrial sensors, investors, entrepreneurs and engineers are rushing to cash in. According to Gartner, Internet of Things (IoT) vendors will earn more than $309 billion by 2020. However, most of those earnings will come from services.
Gartner also estimates that by 2020, the IoT will consist of 26 billion devices. All of those devices, Cisco believes will end up dominating the Internet by 2018. You read that right: In less time than it takes to earn a college degree (much less time these days), machines will communicate over the Internet a heck of a lot more than people do.
With the IoT space in full gold-rush mode, we evaluated more than 70 startups to find 10 that look poised to help shape the future of IoT.
Note: These 10 are listed in alphabetical order and are not ranked.
What they do: Provide a connected pill bottle that ensures patients take their medications.
Headquarters: New York, N.Y.
CEO: Josh Stein. He received his MBA from Wharton in 2012, and, before that, he worked for a number of successful startups in New York City, including Lot18, PlaceVine and FreshDirect.
Founded: October, 2011
Funding: $620K from Blueprint Health Accelerator
Why they’re on this list: There are plenty of companies trying to cash in on IoT by tethering it to healthcare. Let’s call it the Internet of Health (IoH). What’s impressive about AdhereTech, though, is that it focuses on a discrete problem and knocks it out of the park with its solution. It’s simple and smart.
Prescription adherence — sticking to your prescribed medication regimen — is one of the biggest problems plaguing medicine. Current levels of adherence are as low as 40 percent for some medications. Poor adherence to appropriate medication therapy has been shown to result in complications, increased healthcare costs, and even death. Medication adherence for patients with chronic conditions, such as diabetes, hypertension, hyperlipidemia, asthma and depression, is an even more significant problem, often requiring intervention.
According to AdhereTech, of all medication-related hospital admissions in the United States, 33 to 69 percent are related to poor medication adherence. The resulting costs are approximately $100 billion annually, and as many as 125,000 deaths per year in the U.S. can be attributed to medication non-adherence.
AdhereTech’s pill bottle seeks to increase adherence and reduce the costs associated with missed or haphazard medication dosage. The bottle uses sensors to detect when one pill or one liquid milliliter of medication is removed from the bottle. If a patient hasn’t taken his/her medication, the service reminds them via phone call or text message, as well as with on-bottle lights and chimes. The company’s software also asks patients who skip doses why they got off schedule. In addition to helping people remember, AdhereTech aggregates data anonymously to give a clearer picture of patient adherence overall to pharmaceutical companies and medical practitioners.
Customers: AdhereTech has trials running with Boehringer Ingelheim for a TBD medication, The Walter Reed National Military Medical Center for type 2 diabetes medication and Weill Cornell Medical College for HIV medication.
Competitive Landscape: Vitality GlowCap is the most direct competitor for AdhereTech. Other less direct competitors include RXAnte, an analytics company that helps to identify patients most at risk for falling off their prescription regimen, and Proteus Digital Health, which puts tiny digestible sensors inside of pills to give doctors a clearer picture of patient compliance.