2023-12-26 16:55:00
In the United States, the company Celero Systems has designed a connected pill capable of monitoring the vital signals of the person who swallows it, directly from their stomach. An innovation which could allow us to better understand certain diseases and intervene at the right time, but which also raises the thorny question of health data.
As the media explains Wired, it is a biocompatible plastic capsule (tolerated by the body) filled with tiny sensors, a microprocessor, a radio antenna and batteries. Lodged in the stomach after being swallowed like any other medicine, this little gem of technology would be capable of measuring our heartbeat, the rhythm of our breathing or even our body temperature. It is expelled from the body via the stools after a few days.
During the clinical test, the company proved that in the case of patients with sleep apnea, for example, it could allow them to sleep at home without having to be covered with electrodes to carry out a complete diagnosis. And according to the results, it is almost as effective and precise as the traditional method.
“In the future, we could very well imagine that individuals suffering from asthma or heart problems could benefit from remote medical monitoring,” boasts Celero CEO Ben Pless.
The problem is that this tool raises questions in terms of capturing health data. As reported Usbek & RicaFrench researchers were already sounding the alarm in 2018: the diffusion of these 2.0 drugs “will lead to drawing the ethical boundary between, on the one hand, benevolent support in a logic of care and, on the other hand, the implementation systems aimed at other logics, such as, for example, those of surveillance or commercialization of data, which is part of the vast problem of the use of big data in health.”
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