Smart tablets to swallow

by Paul Curzon, Queen Mary University of London

The first ever smart pill has been approved for use. It's like any other pill except that this one has a sensor inside it and it comes with a tracking device patch you wear to make sure you take it.

A big problem with medicine is remembering to take it. It's common for people to be unsure whether they did take today's tablet or not. Getting it wrong regularly can make a difference to how quickly you recover from illness. Many medicines are also very, very expensive. Mass-produced electronics, on the other hand, are cheap. So could the smart pill be a new, potentially useful, solution? The pill contains a sensor that is triggered when the pill dissolves and the sensor meets your stomach acids. When it does, the patch you wear detects its signal and sends a message to your phone to record the fact. The specially made sensor itself is harmless and safe to swallow. Your phone's app can then, if you allow it, tell your doctor so that they know whether you are taking the pills correctly or not.

Smart pills could also be invaluable for medical researchers. In medical trials of new drugs, knowing whether patients took the pills correctly is important but difficult to know. If a large number of patients don't, that could be a reason why the drugs appeared less effective than expected. Smart pills could allow researchers to better work out how regularly a drug needs to be taken to still work.

More futuristically still, such pills may form part of a future health artificial intelligence system that is personalised to you. It would collect data about you and your condition from a wide range of sensors recording anything relevant: from whether you've taken pills to how active you've been, your heart rate, blood pressure and so on: in fact anything useful that can be sensed. Then, using big data techniques to crunch all that data about you, it will tailor your treatment. For example, such a system may be better able to work out how a drug affects you personally, and so be better able to match doses to your body. It may be able to give you personalised advice about what to eat and drink, even predicting when your condition could be about to get better or worse. This could make a massive difference to life for those with long term illnesses like rheumatoid arthritis or multiple sclerosis, where symptoms flare up and die away unpredictably. It could also help the doctors who currently must find the right drug and dose for each person by trial and error.

Computing in future could be looking after your health personally, as long as you are willing to wear it both inside and out.