Ingestible Digital Sensor Tracks Health Data

An ingestible digital sensor the size of a grain of sand and made mostly of silicon can fit inside a pill. It will broadcast health data to a patch on the skin that in turn broadcasts it to a cell phone application. It enables the physician and caregivers to track health data from inside the body.

The effectiveness and safety of drugs are established in clinical trials, and tend to follow well-controlled conditions, with patients taking their drugs at the prescribed rates in the right quantities. At home, adherence to prescribed regimens may not be so easy to monitor, and without information about precisely when patients are taking their medication, doctors cannot see what is the problem should the drug not work as it did in the trials.


The sensor does not contain a battery but works like a potato battery that children make in science lessons at school. It has two conductive materials, one on either side. When these get wet in the stomach, they power the sensor for a short amount of time.

Proteus Digital Health (Redwood City, CA, USA) has just received The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA; Silver Spring, MD, USA) approval to market the ingestible digital sensor. The sensor, formerly known as the Ingestion Event Marker (IEM), is already approved for use in Europe. It tells what time and at what rate we take our medication, for compliance purposes. The company said that its integrated feedback system is also designed to collect a range of other measurements, such as for heart rate, body position and activity.

Eric Topol, geneticist and cardiologist, a professor of genomics at The Scripps Research Institute said, "The FDA validation represents a major milestone in digital medicine. Directly digitizing pills, for the first time, in conjunction with our wireless infrastructure, may prove to be the new standard for influencing medication adherence and significantly aid chronic disease management."

Related Links:
Proteus Digital Health
US Food and Drug Administration