Scientists have developed an ingestible device that can safely monitor vital signs like breathing and heart rate from inside humans. The tool, described November 17 in the journal Device, has the potential to provide accessible and convenient care for people at risk of opioid overdose.
“The ability to facilitate diagnosis and monitor many conditions without having to go into a hospital can provide patients with easier access to healthcare and support treatment,” says Giovanni Traverso, the first author of the paper, associate professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and gastroenterologist at Brigham and Women’s Hospital.
In recent years, scientists have been developing a plethora of ingestible devices. Unlike implantable devices such as pacemakers, ingestible devices are easy to use and do not require a surgical procedure. For example, doctors have been using pill-sized ingestible cameras to conduct colonoscopies, a procedure traditionally conducted in a hospital setting.
The vitals-monitoring pill, or VM Pill, works by monitoring the small vibrations of the body associated with breathing and the beating heart. The pill can detect if a person stops breathing from the inside of the digestive tract.
To test out the VM Pill, the team placed the device in the stomach of pigs which were put under anesthesia. Researchers then administered the pigs with a dose of fentanyl that caused the pig to stop breathing, which is what happens during fentanyl overdose in humans. The device measured the pig’s breathing rate in real time and alerted the researchers, who were able to reverse the overdose.
The team also tested the device in humans for the first time by giving the VM Pill to those being evaluated for sleep apnea. Sleep apnea is a disorder in which breathing repeatedly stops and starts during sleep. Many people with the condition remain undiagnosed, in part because diagnosing the condition involves admitting people to a sleep laboratory where they are hooked up to external devices to monitor their vital signs during sleep.
“Given our interest in opioid safety, it came to our attention that sleep apnea has a lot of the same symptoms as opioid-induced respiratory depression,” says Pless.
Traverso says the current version of the VM Pill passes through the body in about a day, but there are modifications they can make to the device in the future that would allow it to stay longer for long-term monitoring. In the future, they also hope to upgrade the device so it can deliver drugs to reverse conditions like opioid overdose automatically once the device detects symptoms.
(VP/Newswise)
