Trackable Edible Pill for Real Time Monitoring of Gastrointestinal Tract

Abstract

Recent years have witnessed a significant rise in the footprint of electronics in variety of fields like healthcare, energy harvesting, human computer interaction etc., due to the discovery of new materials and better processes of fabrication for electronics. Healthcare sector has seen profound advancements and has drifted towards implantable medical devices for real time health monitoring. The current technologies in non – invasive diagnostics are biocompatible and ingestible but present a major concern of toxic constituent materials. The rise of edible electronics presents several opportunities for the development of hazard free real time health monitoring systems. This thesis proposes a safe, efficient, and decentralised diagnostic technology using an edible pill. The diagnostic system consists of a wearable driver that pings pulses at the pill as it moves through the Gastrointestinal (GI) tract. The pill has components that render its trackability wherein all the constituent materials used are edible and can be absorbed by the human body thereby eliminating potential toxicity. The interaction of the pill with the pings produced by the driver is picked up by the receiver system and processed to obtain the location of the pill in the GI tract. Experiments related to dissolution of gelatin capsule and die – cut coil made of Aluminium foil have been performed and reported in this thesis. The proof of concept of foldable substrate for pill coil using origami – based silk substrate has been demonstrated. The implementation of edible pill tracking in different demarcated zones, along with the algorithm has been provided and the results have been discussed in detail. To summarize, this thesis discusses the means and methods to develop a non – invasive biomedical diagnostic technology for real time health monitoring of GI tract, that can serve as a generic platform for tracking and sensing.