In the first of our on-the-ground interviews from HLTH Europe 2026, we speak to Kieran Daly, general manager and co-founder of HealthBeacon.
The HealthBeacon smart sharps bin tracks medication usage, sends personalised reminders and provides clinicians with invaluable data to inform better clinical decisions.
Hi Kieran. To start, could you tell us a bit about yourself and what HealthBeacon does?
I’m Kieran Daly, general manager and co-founder of HealthBeacon, a business we started 13 years ago.
We’re focused on medication adherence – helping patients stay on time and on track with their medication.
Specifically, we work with patients who self-administer injectable medicines at home. We don’t really operate in areas like diabetes, where people often inject wherever they happen to be.
Instead, we focus on medicines taken at home on a fixed schedule – daily, weekly or fortnightly – for conditions such as Crohn’s disease, psoriasis, growth hormone deficiencies and rare diseases.
Why is medication adherence such a difficult problem to solve?
It’s a complex challenge. What struck us when we first looked at it was that poor adherence exists across virtually every disease area.
People often assume it can’t be that serious for important medications, but it is. The World Health Organization (WHO) estimates that around one in two people don’t stay on their medication or complete their prescribed treatment.
Even something as common as antibiotics shows how difficult it can be to finish a course. Across serious conditions like cancer, it’s the same story.
Kieran Daly
There are lots of reasons: cost, forgetfulness, feeling better and deciding to stop, or feeling worse and giving up because the treatment doesn’t seem to be working.
We can’t solve every one of those issues, but we can help with many of them.
How does HealthBeacon address those challenges?
When we were developing the solution, we started by looking at the humble sharps bin.
At the time, we had a patient services business in Ireland providing injection training on behalf of pharmaceutical companies. Patients would often receive education from a nurse, learn how to self-inject and then be given a sharps bin for safe disposal.
Part of our job was collecting those bins several months later. Some would be surprisingly full, while others felt much lighter. We realised that was telling us something about different patient journeys.
That led us to the idea that the sharps bin itself could become an intelligent device and act as a proxy for medication adherence.
If you’re taking your medication, you’re disposing of the syringe. If you’re not, you’re not.
That’s how we developed the HealthBeacon smart sharps bin.
In the US it’s FDA regulated. In Europe it isn’t regulated as a medical device, but we still operate to the highest standards.
The bin doesn’t look like a traditional sharps bin because patients don’t like having those in their homes.
We added a camera and a SIM card, so every time a syringe is disposed of, it captures a timestamped image and securely uploads it to the cloud.
Analytics confirm whether it’s the expected medication and whether it’s been taken within the correct time window.
If a dose is late, early or missed altogether, we can trigger personalised reminders and other interventions.
In some programmes, if additional support is needed, that information can be escalated to a pharmacist or prescriber as part of the patient’s care team.
How do you encourage patients to embrace the technology rather than see it as intrusive?
That’s something we thought about from day one.
Before HealthBeacon I’d worked on lots of cool-looking tech that functioned perfectly but simply wasn’t adopted. I didn’t want to go through that experience again.
Our approach was to make the product genuinely useful and effortless. First, there has to be a good reason for having it in your home.
Second, you shouldn’t have to learn anything new. If you can use a normal sharps bin, you can use ours.
The third thing I eventually realised is that your sharps bin is just as important on your thousandth injection as it is on your first.
A lot of digital health products are exciting for a few months before they disappear from your home screen. This doesn’t work like that because it’s part of an ongoing routine.
Most importantly, the first person who benefits is the patient. The screen tells them when their next injection is due, reminders are personalised, and we don’t nag people who’ve already taken their medication.
Many reminder programmes send the same message to everyone, even patients who are already doing everything right. We only intervene when the evidence shows someone needs support.
Those design choices have made a real difference. Patients benefit first, and everything else follows from that.
Where is HealthBeacon being used today?
We’re supporting around 60,000 patients worldwide. We’re well established across Europe, while much of our recent growth has come in the US.
We’re now operating across multiple countries, and the adherence challenge is remarkably consistent wherever you go.
There are some cultural differences in how and when you intervene, but the underlying problem is global. Whether we’re working in Japan, Europe or the US, we’re seeing the same challenges.
What’s next for HealthBeacon heading into 2027?
We’re continuing to develop the Smart Sharps Bin, but we’re also expanding into oral medications.
Later this year we’ll begin a soft launch in the US of an oral-dose solution, with a broader commercial rollout planned for next year. I can’t say too much about it yet because we’ll officially launch the product later this summer.
We’re taking many of the same principles we’ve developed for injectable therapies and applying them to oral medication, which is a completely new area for us.
Injectables were interesting because there really wasn’t a precedent for what we created. The smart sharps bin was a new concept, and we’re still the only FDA-regulated product of its kind.
Oral medication is a different challenge because so many people have already tried to solve it.
Patients and healthcare providers already have expectations based on previous products and experiences. We’ll learn a lot as we go, and we certainly don’t pretend to have all the answers yet.
But it’s an exciting next step for the business.
