This device monitors your vital signs… as long as you swallow it!

What if monitoring your vital signs was a small connected pill to swallow, like medicine? If the scenario can make you smile, it has nevertheless become reality with the development ofIngestible Vital Monitor Success (Or ” VM pill ), an ingestible vital monitoring pill capable of monitoring vital signs such as respiratory and heart rates. The transdisciplinary American team behind this preventive treatment brought together various scientists from the universities of Pittsburgh, West Virginia and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). The pill, successfully evaluated on pigs overdosed on opioids, has already been tested on ten human patients suffering from sleep apnea. The results, published in the journal Deviceshow that the VM pill allows breathing and heart rate to be monitored in the same way as traditional clinical devices. It has demonstrated its ability to detect potentially fatal events in a non-intrusive manner, and without side effects.

A non-invasive and inexpensive treatment

The pill, the size of a vitamin capsule, has a accelerometeraccelerometer capable of measuring the movementsmovements of the body from the digestive tract. The collected data is stored in the pill’s internal memory and then regularly transferred to an external receiver via a built-in radio. The collected information is then analyzed using a softwaresoftware personalized on a computercomputer to isolate vital signs. The pill is evacuated a few hours later naturally. In addition to less expensive sleep apnea treatment and invasiveinvasive than current treatments, this pill could also provide better management of increasingly frequent opioid overdoses: many people are, in fact, unaware of their risk of overdose. Ingestible devices could therefore detect respiratory changes associated with an overdose and allow better management.