2023 Author: Bryan Walter | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-05-21 22:24
MIT engineers worked with doctors at Brigham and Women's Hospital to develop a prototype of an indigestible electronic pill that can generate electricity when exposed to stomach acid. MIT News briefly talks about the development.
Electronic tablets are one of the most promising areas in modern medicine. This is commonly referred to as swallowed drug dispensing devices and soft-coated diagnostic electronics that collect information. Among the problems that the developers of electronic pills are solving, there is also the problem of power supply - using your own battery increases the dimensions of an electronic tablet and limits the life of the body.
Developed by engineers from MIT, the prototype is 40 millimeters long and 12 millimeters in diameter, eliminating the need for a built-in battery. Instead, the electronic tablet needs stomach acid, which is used to generate electricity - the developers have embedded electrodes made of zinc and copper into the surface of the electronic tablet, which, when immersed in an acidic environment, begin to work as a galvanic cell.
The generated electricity, the authors note, is sufficient, for example, to power a temperature sensor and a wireless transmitter. In experiments carried out on pigs, an electronic tablet successfully transmitted data every 12 seconds to a base station located at a distance of two meters, and the transit time through the gastrointestinal tract was six days. According to the authors, when moving into the small intestine, the efficiency of a galvanic cell drops by a factor of one hundred, but this can be compensated for by a corresponding decrease in the frequency of sending data.
In the future, developers propose using such voltaic cells to power other non-digestible medical devices. For example, researchers suggest using gold foil capsules to dispense drugs over time.
Previously, for personalized pharmacology, it was also proposed to print the tablets themselves on a 3D printer - depending on the shape of the resulting tablet, different rates of drug release in the patient's body can be achieved.
