Chips track what is going on inside your body

Washington Post:

Each morning around 6, Mary Ellen Snodgrass swallows a computer chip. It’s embedded in one of her pills and roughly the size of a grain of sand. When it hits her stomach, it transmits a signal to her tablet computer indicating that she has successfully taken her heart and thyroid medications.

“See,” said Snodgrass, checking her online profile page. With a few swipes, she brings up an hourly timeline of her day with images of white pills marking the times she ingested a chip. “I can see it go in. The pill just jumped onto the screen.”

Snodgrass — a 91-year-old retired schoolteacher who has been trying out the smart pills at the behest of her son, an employee at the company that makes the technology — is at the forefront of what many predict will be a revolution in medicine powered by miniature chips, sensors, cameras and robots with the ability to access, analyze and manipulate your body from the inside.

As the size and cost of chip technology has fallen dramatically over the past few years, dozens of companies and academic research teams are rushing to make ingestible or implantable chips that will help patients track the condition of their bodies in real time and in a level of detail that they have never seen before.

Several have been approved by the Food and Drug Administration, including a transponder containing a person’s medical history that is injected under the skin, a camera pill that can search the colon for tumors, and the technology, made by Proteus Digital Health, that Snodgrass is using. That system is being used to make sure older people take their pills; it involves navigating a tablet and wearing a patch, which some patients might find challenging.

Scientists are working on more advanced prototypes. Nano­sensors, for example, would live in the bloodstream and send messages to smartphones whenever they saw signs of an infection, an impending heart attack or another issue — essentially serving as early-warning beacons for disease. Armies of tiny robots with legs, propellers, cameras and wireless guidance systems are being developed to diagnose diseases, administer drugs in a targeted manner and even perform surgery.

But while the technology may be within reach, the idea of putting little machines into the human body makes some uncomfortable, and there are numerous uncharted scientific, legal and ethical questions that need to be thought through.
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I have had experience with the camera pill that searches the colon.  I thought it was a good idea and certainly less hassle the normal colon checkups.  Having been in and out of the hospital several times in recent months I am familiar with how medical professionals use blood lab work to diagnose and track treatment.  If you could get a chip to do that, I would be all for it.  It would be progress in my opinion from having nurses poke around to draw blood samples. I suspect that it could eventually lower cost for treating many illnesses.