Improve Home Healthcare Outcomes with Force.com & the Internet of Things

Editor's Notes

• #4: When you’re at the IOT Lab, you’re going to see a multitude of technologies that can range from pick up and go to “I think I gotta think about this one.” When you’re a software person, like me, that can often feel overwhelming and intimidating. But given the right focus you can embrace the IOT movement the same way everyone in this room embraced the cloud movement. The way I can recommend everyone think about it, the way I thought about it, was to use domain knowledge. My career has provided me quite a bit of domain knowledge in the healthcare space. Last year I talked about integrating Force.com with the Fitbit, which is apart of the IOT and quantified self movement. This year I’ll show you more around the pharma and doctor side of healthcare, along with the patient.
• #5: Working at Mavens, the one thing I hear from our life sciences customers, and their customers the HCPs, is the problem of Patient Adherence. How do Doctors make sure you are adhering to your medication requirements? This is a real and ever constant issue with many constraints. The first is people, the second is market restrictions, and the third is technology. What I’m going to try and do is use modern technology to not change a patients behavior, but work with them as adults (or children).
• #6: Now one important aspect of that modern technology is the recent smart device movement also called the Internet of Things. These are devices, both wearable and not, that have very specific functions and can communicate with the Internet. Your smartphone is not an internet of thing, your toaster with a heat sensor is not an internet of thing, your toaster with a heat sensor that can email you when its done IS an Internet of thing. That’s really the distinction: making our devices not only smarter but easier to access.
• #7: The second aspect of that modern technology are available APIs that can extend the functionality of the Internet of Things. The Arduino is great on its own, but you couple its capabilities with a Twine and now you have access to the outside world. The Pebble Smart watch is capable of getting notifications from your phone, but what if you want specific notifications from a lot of apps? That is where a $5 iPhone app called Pushover can come into play. And in the middle of it all is Force.com, which is calling all of these APIs for us as a hub, and acting as n Apex REST API as well.
• #8: The first thing this solution is doing is taking the point of view of the Doctor. How do I let my patient know they need to take their medication. This is where we can use the platform to use secure PHI, or Patient Health Information, data to alert them on their Smart watch that they need to take their medication. I chose the smart watch vs a smart phone because its on your arm, the patient not only gets the message but it vibrates too. You can miss a text on a phone, it’s a bit harder to miss a text on a watch. Here we are going to use the Pushover API and use the Twilio SMS API.
• #9: The second part of the solution is to hook up a 99 cent pillbox I got from Walgreens to the Internet. In order to make this Pillbox an Internet of Thing it takes a few devices. There are many different device combinations you can use to make this pillbox smarter. I chose this one because it was the quickest to put together from zero to smart pillbox. I’ll go into what every specific device does….right now!
• #10: First thing I want to do though is walk through some of the code. Basically how encrypted fields work within Salesforce, how Apex uses those encrypted fields and passes that data to various secure APIs, how to setup an anonymous apex rest api endpoint, a few lines of Processing code the Arduino is running, and how the Twine when its all said and done calls our Anonymous Apex REST API. From there, we will run the demo again but talk through what each device does.
• #11: Now this is all very clearly a rapid prototype. But how do we get this to production? Really the process is in miniaturizing the electronics. Creating PCB Boards and components that are geared specifically for this use case. While that process and level of fabrication may reach beyond the internet of things process, you can still get there quicker with it. Do not deny yourself a chance to see where things are going. The IOT movement now is where the cloud movement was a few years ago. Don’t deny yourself a chance to not only get involved on the ground floor, but to start making an impact with those tools now, today.