February 28, 2023 – From heartburn to hemorrhoids and all the things in between, gastrointestinal problems affect 60 to 70 million Americans. What makes them so frustrating – other than the frequent trips to the toilet – are the invasive and ugly tests that need to be undergone for diagnosis, comparable to Endoscopy (inserting a versatile tube into an individual’s digestive tract) or X-rays, which higher radiation exposure.
But in the subsequent few years, a revolutionary recent option may turn into available that guarantees greater comfort and convenience.
A gaggle of researchers has developed a small pill-like device that, once ingested, provides precise, real-time data on its path through the body. The technology is described in Natural Electronics along with the outcomes of in vitro and animal studies on efficacy.
“You can think of it like a GPS that you see on your phone as the Lyft or Uber driver moves,” says study writer Azita Emami, PhD, a professor of electrical and medical engineering on the California Institute of Technology. “You can see the driver coming down the streets and track them in real time, but you can imagine that you can do that with a much smaller device in the body with much greater precision.”
It is just not the primary option for GI testing that may be swallowed. A “Capsule endoscopy” Camera can take pictures of the digestive tract. And a “wireless motility capsule“” uses sensors to measure pH, temperature and pressure. However, these technologies may not work for the entire time the intestines are passing through, which is usually about 1 to 3 days. And while they collect information, they can't track their location in the gastrointestinal tract in real time. Your doctor can learn a lot from this level of detail.
“If a patient has motility problems in the gastrointestinal tract, this can actually [doctor] where the motility problem is occurring, where the slowing is occurring, which is much more revealing,” says Emami. Such slowing is common in notoriously frustrating GI problems like irritable bowel syndrome, or IBS, and inflammatory bowel disease, or IBD.
When developing this technology, the research team was inspired by magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). Magnetic fields transmit data from the Bluetooth-enabled device to a smartphone. An external component, a magnetic field generator that appears like a flat mat, powers the device and is sufficiently small to be carried in a backpack – or placed under a bed, attached to a jacket or mounted on a rest room seat. The swallowable part accommodates tiny chips embedded in a capsule-like package.
Before this technology can come to market, more testing is required, including clinical trials on humans, says Emami. That will likely take several years.
The team also desires to make the device smaller (it currently measures about 1cm wide and 2cm long) and cheaper, and offer more features, comparable to delivering drugs to the gastrointestinal tract. These innovations could take a couple of years.