Podcast: Swallow Confirmed: Smart Pills That "Ping" From Your Stomach

In this episode, we talk about MIT's bio-resorbable RFID smart pill that activates in ~10 minutes after swallowing to verify a dose in real time.

This podcast is sponsored by Mouser Electronics. 

Episode Notes

(02:20) Pills that communicate from the stomach could improve medication adherence

(07:13) Innovative Solutions for Tracking Medication

(10:46) The Technology Behind the Smart Pill

(13:42) Conclusion and Future Implications

This episode was brought to you by Mouser, our go-to source for electronics parts for any hobby or prototype. Click HERE to learn more about making healthcare smarter with electronics.

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Transcript

In the world of medicine, treatment doesn't stop when you leave the doctor's office. Sometimes it's just when it's starting, right? When they give you medicine to go take it home. Many folks don't take their medicines on time and this causes serious health problems and costs us a lot of money. So, on today's episode, we're talking about a team from MIT that made a pill that sends a signal from the stomach after it's been swallowed, proving that the patient took the medicine on the right timeline.

What's up friends, this is The Next Byte Podcast where one gentleman and one scholar explore the secret sauce behind cool tech and make it easy to understand.

Daniel: What's up everyone. Welcome back to the next bite. On today's episode, we're talking all about a pill that tells your doctor when you've taken it to help with medication adherence.  But before we jump too much into this specific topic at hand, let's talk about today's sponsor, Mouser Electronics. They're longest running sponsor of this podcast. And there's a reason why we've been partnering with them for so long is because our mission here is to make interesting technology easy for people to understand, regardless of their background, whether they're technical or not. Mouser does a great job of doing that through the realm of the world of electronics. One of the things that we love about that is their technical resources. So, we're linking one of those today. And we love using Mouser's technical resources as a way of understanding the technical landscape, specifically within the realm of electronics. In this case, they're talking about how electronics can help make healthcare smarter, specifically the realm of implantable electronics and adjustable sensors. There's a portion of this article which talks about tiny electronic pills that can transmit data from inside the gastrointestinal tract, the GI tract, and how they're emerging in smart health. That's exactly what we're talking about during today's episode. So, as an awesome primer of the electronics and healthcare realm as a whole, and then also specifically this topic we're talking about today, which is ingestible sensors for the GI tract, an awesome starting place would be this technical resource that we're going to link in the show notes.

Farbod: As always, they're one step ahead of us when it comes to pointing out the cool tech that's coming down the pipeline.

Daniel: The cool thing about your friend that's one step ahead is if they are your friend and they share information with you; they make sure that you're not behind. That's exactly what we're doing here. Sharing, sharing their information. That's one step ahead of us.

Farbod: It's a good way of phrasing it.

Daniel: Alrighty. Let's jump to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, MIT, one of our frequent destinations here on the podcast. And kind of zoom out and talk about the problem that's at hand here, is that many people don't take their medicine on time. And that sounds crazy, but when you've got lots of pills to take, or you're not great at building a habit to take them at the right time, this can cause some serious issues. And if you're, I just saw you raise your hand. You don't take your medicine on time?

Farbod: I don't. I do not take my vitamin D3 every day as I should. And I think I'm not alone.

Daniel: That's what I was going to say is like medicine, like maybe I take it every single time when I have to, but like supplements, I definitely skip those sometimes on accident just because I don't have a habit to take them at the right, you know, same time every single day. When you or I are talking about our supplements, the stakes there are pretty low, right? Like if you miss your D3, you just take your D3 tomorrow and you'll be good. But if you have a very critical health issue where the medicine and the timing of that medicine in particular is very, very important this can cause some serious health issues and cost a lot of money if you don't take your medicine at the right time. Specifically drugs for people that have had organ implants, people with severe cases of HIV or tuberculosis, really infectious drugs.

Farbod: Right.

Daniel: The timing of the medicine is critical to the medical outcome there. And the outcome being you get an organ transplant and your body rejects it unless you take your immunosuppressant drugs at the exact right time as a part of the regimen. Or if you've got a bad form of really infectious disease, not taking your medicine spaced out properly can make sure that, it can cause you to end up with bad side effects, or it can mean that the infection gains ground against your body and you're not able to fight it off. So, both of those are poor outcomes. Doctors have long talked about ways that they can make pills easier for people to take. Take one giant pill and it sits in your stomach for a week, and then it slowly releases the medicine over time but changing how the pill is made doesn't always work. In the past, there's been this idea of like, what if we just are able to keep track of how patients have taken their medicine? Let's put RFID sensors inside these pills. And so, when someone takes them and they digest them, we'll be able to see in their stomach that there's a chip there and it means that they took the pill. But the challenge there being, most RFID sensors are not biodegradable or not biocompatible. So, then you end up in the situation where you've got lots of little silver tags floating around inside your body or having to pass through your digestive tract just for doctors to be able to keep track of your medicine consumption.

Farbod: Well, you hit the nail on the head with the digestive tract because they've been trying to tackle the biodegradable, which like they tend to be. But then a lot of the folks in this population who are at risk are also not doing so well on the GI front either. So, any blockages on the GI tract then compounds the problem. So that your solution just adds another problem. So, it's not good to be biodegradable. You have to be bioresorbable. And that's the real piece of the puzzle here. And before we move on from it too much, he talked about like how bad it was, how many people this impacts, just to give some numbers to that effect. It's estimated that 125,000 deaths occur, I think in the US alone, just from not taking medications on time. 48% of medications that have been prescribed are not being taken as prescribed. So that's almost half. And it costs, I think the global economy, somewhere around $290 billion a year because people are not taking their medicine on time.

Daniel: And just personal anecdote there, like you and I spoke about our medicine, but I also have like an experience that hits really close to home with my late mother-in-law when she was toward the end of her life, she was fighting off cancer. She had all these complications. She was taking like something like 17 different types of pills every single day. And I made like, you know, I just like, cool spreadsheet. I made a spreadsheet in Google sheets and printed it out. And we were using the spreadsheet to keep track of all the medicine she had taken and when, and that was like super helpful for people that were helping take care of her. But even still, even with all of us having all of our eyeballs on making sure that she was well taken care of, even with a spreadsheet to keep track of the exact minute to which each medicine was taken every single day, there was a lot of situations where we were like, did we give her that? Did I give her the right one? Did I give her the right amount? And specifically, for like the most important medicine, which in this case, like at some point she was taking chemotherapy pills at home, like the chemo pill at home. Like it would be really, really helpful. Give us a lot of peace of mind to understand when exactly she took that pill and then being able to log that electronically. And that's kind of what these folks are doing here. So, the large picture here is let's make a pill that sends a signal from inside the stomach after it's swallowed. It doesn't sell us send a signal since before it's swallowed. The signal proves that the patient took the medicine and you're able to capture the signal and log it electronically. But then at the end of the day, most of these parts of the pill have to break down in the body, leaving the minimum amount of stuff that actually has to pass through your digestive tract. Most of the material has to be able to break down in the stomach. And so, this team from MIT has developed just that. They have a zinc antenna, which is being used to capture RFID signals and then carry those to the chip, which broadcasts a signal back to the reader. The zinc in that antenna is safe and it breaks down in the body. It's not like using silver particles that don't break down in the body and they're not safe. They have a coating around the entire pill that blocks signals until it melts in the stomach. And that's the Faraday cage portion of this. And then there's a very, very small RF chip, a tiny radio part that is not biodegradable, but it's very, very small. And so, what actually has to exit the body is not this full pill that you take or even a portion of the pill, it's a very, very small antenna that is less than 500 micrometers.

Farbod: It's 400 by 400. Yeah.

Daniel: So very, very, very small. And that should create little to no strain on the GI tract as opposed to having to pass entire inch long pills through your digestive tract.

Farbod: I mean, yeah, the flow basically is you have this pill, it's coated in cellulose that acts as a Faraday cage. Meaning when it's in the bottle or when you're holding it, it's actually not transmitting any data that's, useless because it's not in your body. You take it as it's going through your digestive tract, the coating goes away. Within 10 minutes of you taking it, it starts sending signals out to whatever RFID reader there is out there. As the pill breaks down with this zinc antenna over it and the cellulose coating, you get the signal that it's deteriorating, deteriorating, and then eventually gone. Once it's gone, it's being resorbed into your body because it's cellulose and zinc. So, you can easily do that. And the last thing that moves through your digestive tract is this teeny tiny RFID chip that definitely does not cause GI blocks. So, all the issues of the biodegradable tags or the non-smart ones addressed in one shot, basically.

Daniel: And it basically, right? what you, the mechanism here is you need a reader outside the body, sending a signal into the body and then inside the body, the antenna picks up the signal, gives it to the chip, which blasts a return signal back to the reader. So, you did need some external hardware here. You can't just like swallow chips and then they're connecting to the cloud directly and saying, hey, I've been swallowed. You need another piece of hardware outside the body to receive the signal. They did this in animal testing and showed that the signal worked from about two feet away. So, it's not like you can just have this sitting somewhere in your house and it'll pick it up. But if you were to have something like that as a wearable on your body, if you were to carry a little pocket device around that's talking to your stomach and telling the device, whether you've swallowed your medicine or not, that could be an absolutely like feasible way of making this happen. Without having to sit under an antenna every single day, all day long. You can kind of just wear it as a part of your body and have that do the broadcasting. I think the interesting thing there is like, just make it a bracelet or an ankle bracelet and have it communicate to the body and then pass the information to the doctor to confirm that the pill has been taken at the correct time.

Farbod: The grid. I can't imagine a better solution all around than this. Again, the only caveat, which you already mentioned it, is that you need to have a reader within two feet. And I think the wearable solution fits into our daily lives because we already have wearables everywhere.

Daniel: One thing that I do think there's some area for improvement here. I still don't like the idea of having to pass the little RF chip to your GI tract. It would be really cool if they're able to achieve this with chipless RFID. Because you're not necessarily looking for changes in signal strength. You're just trying to see if there's a signal at all. So, I wonder if there's any way of them measuring resonance from outside the body and seeing if the chips are resonating at all. Similar to the chipless RFID that we spoke about a couple of weeks ago for food safety.

Farbod: Yeah.

Daniel: If there's an opportunity to just use a big zinc antenna without a tiny RF chip and see if there's any possibility of not having to pass any chips to the body at all. Just saying it's still for me as a patient would make me feel a little bit hesitant to say, hey, if you take this pill every 12 hours, that means you have to pass 14 chips through your GI tract by the end of the week.

Farbod: Yeah, maybe. We'll put it into the uh product bin for the team at MIT.

Daniel: Yeah, exactly. No, it is very exciting though. It's cool to see them creatively attack challenges here and like making an antenna out of zinc, I think is like my favorite part of this entire process because I also need to take a zinc supplement. So, it's like…

Farbod: One last supplement that you don't have to take. Yeah.

Daniel: You know, just let the antenna be made out of the thing, the mineral that you need to supplement anyway.

Farbod: I like that. Yeah. Sign me up. Just for the zinc alone.

Daniel: Yeah. All right. Should we wrap it up here?

Farbod: Let's send it.

Daniel: All right. What if your pill could text your doctor to let you know that you actually took it? MIT just built a smart capsule that does exactly that. It has a tiny antenna that's inside the pill, but it switches on only after you swallow it. So, it sends a signal from your stomach to prove it was swallowed. It uses a zinc antenna and a tiny RF chip to ping a wearable device. It's covered in a Faraday cage that's digestible. So, it only transmits after it's been in your stomach and everything but the chip breaks down safely inside of you. This means that doctors can help keep track of critical medications without guessing, without missed doses, but also without you having to pass a bunch of electronics through GI tract, which also sounds uncomfortable.

Farbod: Agreed.

Daniel: All right. That's it. That's the pod.

As always, you can find these and other interesting & impactful engineering articles on Wevolver.com.

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The Next Byte: We're two engineers on a mission to simplify complex science & technology, making it easy to understand. In each episode of our show, we dive into world-changing tech (such as AI, robotics, 3D printing, IoT, & much more), all while keeping it entertaining & engaging along the way.