By Sara Miller, NoCamels -
A smart cap designed for bottles containing medicines helps users be aware of the expiration dates for drugs and other time-sensitive pharmaceutical products, with a simple dial that records the day and month of opening.
Medication comes with two dates – one after which it cannot be used at all and one that gives a certain period to use the drug from the moment it is opened, usually several months. And it is that second date, which is often difficult to remember, that the Innocap smart cap records.
“We found a problem regarding medication and expiration from the opening date,” Innocap co-founder Liron Sharony tells NoCamels.
He explains that while the expiration date applies primarily to liquid medicines, it is also applied to many other health-related products, including vitamins and nutritional supplements and even baby formula and mouthwash, all of which are planned for future inclusion by Innocap.
“These dates actually are approved by the health authorities and it is very critical to avoid the products beyond their expiration date,” Sharony says.
After that, he says, not only does the effectiveness of the medication decline, it can also pose a health risk.
Innocap’s patent-protected cap is already fitted to the bottle when it is handed over to the user, and looks the same as a regular cap, save for two small dials on the top that represent the day and month of opening.
The user adjusts the numbers on each dial to mark the date on which the product was opened, allowing them to know exactly when to discard it.
When the right date has been chosen, a button on the cap fixes the dials in place, so that it cannot change.
As well as the dial, the cap also comes with technology to allow it to connect to the user’s smartphone, without the need to download an app.
And because there is no app involved, the digital side is accessed by a web browser. When the user taps their phone on the cap, it opens up a virtual leaflet for the product, resembling the information inside physical packaging.
The virtual leaflet includes all the information about the product as well as the option to set a daily reminder to take it (primarily easily forgotten vitamins and supplements) and a dosage calculator based on the weight of the consumer, which the company says is of great help when administering medication to a child.
The cap also facilitates repurchase of certain products by providing a link to the manufacturer’s website.
Sharony created Innocap with co-founder and CEO Yves Sibony in 2020, determined to end the potentially detrimental guesswork involved for many people using medication with a defined shelf life. They spent three years developing the cap.
“People don’t write down when they opened a product,” Sibony tells NoCamels. “And if they don’t write the date of the opening, they can never know if it’s past its expiration or not.”
This is true, he explains, for baby formula, vitamins, food supplements and drugs, and is very common indeed.
“We are all in the same situation – we have a lot of products and we don’t know when we opened them,” he says.
He says that although many drug companies write a warning on their packaging, telling consumers to make a note of when they opened the medication, Innocap research shows that less than one third actually follow this direction.
“They forget – they don’t make a note on their phones, they don’t write it on the packaging,” he says. “Only 30 percent said that they do it. That’s nothing!”
And all of the data regarding a person’s healthcare is completely anonymous, Sharony stresses, with users only identified by a random number in order to maintain regulatory medical privacy.
Sharony compares the cap to the child-proof covers that were created by a Canadian physician in 1967 and soon after made compulsory in many parts of the world.
“This product allows parents to give their children fresh medications,” he says.
Sharony and Sibony created the cap after both separately having been faced with trying to work out whether medication for their sick children was still usable or had passed its expiration date.
“We both found ourselves with kids with a fever in the middle of the night, and we reached for medication to give them and saw that it was already open,” Sharony says.
“We hesitated – is it expired or not? And because I didn’t have a way to know, in the middle of the night I found myself driving to try to locate a pharmacy to buy my kids medication.”
In fact, Sharony says, his own child even once had a bad reaction to out of date medication that resulted in a dash to the emergency room.
Funding for the Herzliya-based startup came from what Sharony describes as “private angels and one small VC from Israel,” raising $1.2 million in three years.
And Innocap has also just launched commercially, working with Israeli pharmaceutical company CTS on a very limited range of products that from last month come fitted with the smart cap.
The partnership is for five years and, Sibony says, involves production of “many millions” of caps as the number of items fitted with them increases.
Innocap is also in talks with another three Israeli pharmaceutical companies to manufacture caps for their products, and Sharony is confident that they have the infrastructure in place to easily scale up to meet the anticipated massive demand.
The pair say that other smart caps have been produced to deal with this issue, but they were designed for sale directly to the consumer and not via the pharmaceutical companies themselves.
Innocap, they say, is the only one in the world that has been developed as an integral part of the medication production itself, and their patent is a global one.
“We are providing a platform,” says Sibony, “that gives you tools and features to manage your needs in a smart way.”
