AntTail, a Dutch monitoring services provider focused on the pharmaceutical industry, has selected U.K telecommunications firm Vodafone’s Managed IoT Connectivity Platform to provide support to its monitoring solution.
Pharmaceutical supply chains are typically long and fragmented, making medication vulnerable to temperature variation. Current temperature monitoring systems do not offer coverage for the full supply chain as the the full view from manufacturing to patient is not available. To tackle this problem, AntTail worked to develop a solution for the weakest link in the chain: the last mile.
“The biggest problem is with the last mile,” says Mark Roemers, CEO and founder of AntTail, “from the pharmacist to the patient. Patients know they have to store their medication in the fridge, but they are not always as rigorous as they should be.”
“This has a huge cost to insurance companies and to patients,” adds Roemers. “The patient may think they’re storing the medicine correctly, when in fact they’ve been injecting ineffective medicine for the last six months. And doctors will have no idea why the medicine is not working.”
The AntTail solution is a small sensor attached to the medicine’s packaging. This sensor can detect changes in temperature, movement and light.
The Dutch firm was looking for a connectivity platform capable of delivering a robust network, in order to allow patients, pharmacists and logistics customers to access and interpret the sensors’ data, from anywhere.
The Vodafone Managed IoT Connectivity Platform allows AntTail to install the SIM during production, to be activated by customers as required. AntTail sensors monitor medicines and send alerts. If the temperature deviates, the pharmacist is notified and they can then call the patient or send new medicine.
“We are sitting on a rich source of data. Logistics companies can track a package throughout the supply chain and meet any compliance issues. Doctors can see when patients take the medicine. There is a huge amount of data to analyze, and the Vodafone platform allows us to create cloud-based access for different types of user,” the executive added.
“We’re in a position to design innovative solutions for our customers based on the strengths of the wireless capabilities of our sensors and flexibility of the back-office. Everything is securely hosted in the AntTail cloud. Local software, local storage and docking stations we do without thanks to our cloud infrastructure.”
AntTail has 4,000 SIMs on order for the Netherlands. The company has received interest from seven other European markets including Germany which would require 20,000-plus SIMs.
