Ingestible Sensors

Kourosh Kalantar-zadeh, Nam Ha, Jian Zhen Ou, Kyle J. Berean

Ingestible sensing capsules are fast emerging as a critical technology that has the ability to greatly impact health, nutrition, and clinical areas. These ingestible devices are noninvasive and hence are very attractive for customers. With widespread access to smart phones connected to the Internet, the data produced by this technology can be readily seen and reviewed online, and accessed by both users and physicians. The outputs provide invaluable information to reveal the state of gut health and disorders as well as the impact of food, medical supplements, and environmental changes on the gastrointestinal tract. One unique feature of such ingestible sensors is that their passage through the gut lumen gives them access to each individual organ of the gastrointestinal tract. Therefore, ingestible sensors offer the ability to gather images and monitor luminal fluid and the contents of each gut segment including electrolytes, enzymes, metabolites, hormones, and the microbial communities. As such, an incredible wealth of knowledge regarding the functionality and state of health of individuals through key gut biomarkers can be obtained. This Review presents an overview of the gut structure and discusses current and emerging digestible technologies. The text is an effort to provide a comprehensive overview of ingestible sensing capsules, from both a body physiology point of view as well as a technological view, and to detail the potential information that they can generate.