A pill that tells you when to take it?
If you have trouble remembering whether you took your
pills on time, your medicine may soon have the answer for you.
Pills for anything from the common cold to diabetes or
cancer can be embedded with tiny ingestible chips that keep track of whether a
patient is taking their medicine on time.
The digital feedback technology, devised by Redwood City,
California-based Proteus Digital Health Inc, can also prompt patients to take
their medicine and even ask them to take a walk if they have been inactive for
too long.
The sensor was last month approved by the U.S. Food and
Drug Administration and Proteus has attracted investments from Swiss drug giant
Novartis and Japanese drug firm Otsuka Holdings Co Ltd.
The swallowed sensor is linked to a skin patch worn on
the patient's torso, which captures the report sent by the sensor.
About the size of a grain of salt, the sensor has no
battery or antenna and is activated when it gets wet from stomach juices.
That completes a circuit between coatings of copper and
magnesium on either side, generating a tiny electric voltage for a few minutes.
The skin patch records the digital message, along with
the patient's heart rate, body angle and activity, and sends the data to a
bluetooth-enabled device such as a phone or computer.
"Think of this as a high-tech version of an
old-style Morse code telegraph key," Savage said.
The data is then uploaded to a computer network for
viewing by patients, caregivers and physicians.
The system allows users to set up alarms to remind them
to take medicines or to issue an alert if the patient is inactive for a certain
time.
Novartis is testing Proteus' sensor in renal
transplantation patients -- a group that is required to maintain a strict
regimen of anti-rejection drugs.
"Study results show that when used properly, the
Proteus system was observed to monitor patients' medication-taking behavior
with very high accuracy," Novartis spokeswoman Julie Masow said.
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