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There are some companies doing this for general prescriptions. Vitality - http://www.vitality.net/ - has a wireless cap that helps track adherence.

But asthma is pretty unique since the inhalers are used in "rescue" situations and there are strong geographic correlations that arise from environmental issues.

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Yeah the fact that it tracks the use of inhalers is very clever. It provides a much more rich history of use to help doctors decide the best way to manage their patients. Currently medications for asthmatics are determined by a asthma severity scale (symptom frequency, night time attacks, etc) - so a more fine-grained analytics would be interesting.

I would think this approach would work well if applied to other diseases where the frequency that the patient takes the medication is tied to symptoms - chest pain/nitroglycerin or acid-reflux/antacids are a couple of examples.

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