Electronic pill monitors your breathing and heart rate from your gut | New Scientist
18.11.23, 16:42
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Health
Electronic pill monitors
your breathing and
heart rate from your gut
A smart pill can accurately monitor your breathing and
heart rate from inside your gut, which may be useful for
detecting sleep apnoea
By Alice Klein
17 November 2023
The device contains an accelerometer that measures breathing and
heart rate by detecting vibrations in the gut
Ben Pless
A smart pill that can measure your breathing and heart
rate from inside your gut could potentially diagnose sleep
apnoea and even detect opioid overdoses.
https://www.newscientist.com/article/2403367-electronic-pill-monitors-your-breathing-and-heart-rate-from-your-gut/
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Electronic pill monitors your breathing and heart rate from your gut | New Scientist
18.11.23, 16:42
Sleep apnoea is defined as lapses in breathing during
sleep
/article-topic/sleep/. Diagnosis usually involves
an overnight stay in hospital while being hooked up to
devices that monitor a person’s breathing, heart rate and
other physiological measures.
Now, Giovanni Traverso
https://engineering.mit.edu/faculty/giovanni-traverso/ at
the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and his
colleagues have developed an ingestible electronic device
that may allow people to be assessed for sleep apnoea
wirelessly and cheaply while at home.
The device, which is roughly the size of a vitamin
supplement, contains a tiny accelerometer that measures
breathing and heart rate by detecting vibrations in the
gut. It also has a medical-implant radio to transmit this
information to an external computer.
The team tested the smart pill in 10 people, with an
average age of 41, who were already booked in at the
West Virginia University Medicine Sleep Evaluation
Center.
All the participants were able to easily swallow the pill
and didn’t experience any side effects. Once in their guts,
it measured their breathing rate with 93 per cent accuracy
and heart rate with 96 per cent accuracy, which were
determined by connecting the participants to standard
monitoring equipment.
Only one person in the study had uncontrolled sleep
apnoea, which the researchers were able to detect via the
measurements collected by the device.
Traverso and his colleagues believe the pill could also be
given to opioid users to detect if they stop breathing due
to an overdose and then send an alert for help.
https://www.newscientist.com/article/2403367-electronic-pill-monitors-your-breathing-and-heart-rate-from-your-gut/
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Electronic pill monitors your breathing and heart rate from your gut | New Scientist
18.11.23, 16:42
To explore this idea, they introduced the pill into the
stomach of an anaesthetised pig before giving it a large
dose of the opioid fentanyl. The device detected when the
fentanyl caused a sharp drop in the pig’s breathing rate,
allowing the researchers to administer the medicine
naloxone to reverse the opioid effects and return the pig’s
breathing rate to normal.
In its current form, the pill is typically excreted within a
day, which could limit its utility in detecting overdoses.
However, the researchers hope to modify it so it can stay
in the gut for longer. They are also looking at ways to
engineer the pill so it automatically releases naloxone
when an opioid user stops breathing.
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https://www.newscientist.com/article/2403367-electronic-pill-monitors-your-breathing-and-heart-rate-from-your-gut/
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