Background worker dynos on Rails using Heroku

Hi,

I have a rails application that requires data from an API to run. Since
the
API is slow I am looking to have a background process run continuously
and
scrape the API for new messages and add it to the application database

From some reading , a worker dyno seems to be the best way to achieve
this.
Any links on how to go about scheduling a continuous running worker
process
in the background and make it to talk to the Rails DB preferably using
ActiveRecord.

Thanks,
Ganesh