Imagine if a vitamin sized pill could collect medical data from your body. Companies such as SmartPill have come out with wireless devices contained in tiny capsules to collect information from inside the body.
The SmartPill capsule includes miniaturized sensors or cameras, a printed circuit board and tiny batteries that work to collect medical data as it makes its way through a person’s gastrointestinal tract.
Once swallowed, the device collects the required information, stores the data and transmits it wirelessly to a receiver that the patient keeps close by during the testing. The device then transmits the data to an external receiver before being excreted from the body a day or two later. A physician collects the data from the receiver and processes it using a laptop and proprietary software from SmartPill Corp.
Doctors often use invasive methods such as catheters, endoscopic instruments or radioisotopes for collecting information about the digestive tract.
One of the main challenges for a doctor is determining what is happening in the stomach and intestines. Doctors can inspect the colon and peer into the stomach using endoscopic instruments. But some areas cannot be easily viewed and finding out how muscles are working can be difficult. People often suffer for years without accurate diagnoses. Digestive diseases and disorders can include symptoms such as acid reflux, bloating, heartburn, abdominal pain, constipation, difficulty swallowing or loss of appetite. Electronic pills are being used to measure muscle contraction, ease of passage and other factors to reveal information unavailable in the past
So device companies have been developing easier, less intrusive ways to gather information.
These new electronic inventions transmit information such as acidity, pressure and temperature levels or images of the esophagus and intestine to your doctor’s computer for analysis.
By the end of the year, patients suffering from a painful gastrointestinal (GI) problem will be able to swallow a vitamin-size electronic pill that can collect data from their bodies and wirelessly send it to a nearby device.
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