The pill that texts the doctor - from inside your body

According to the World Health Organisation around 50% of us fail to take medicines correctly, while over 50% of drugs are prescribed, dispensed or sold inappropriately.

Not only can this have horrifying consequences for patients, it also costs healthcare providers millions every year.

So technology to help avoid these situations could prove lucrative.

There's tremendous confusion around appropriate use of medicines and how they work”Andrew ThomsonProteus Digital HealthTalk it out

"Human beings aren't robots, and if they're asked to take medicines or do anything that requires very high levels of routine repetition they are going to find that really tough," says Andrew Thomson, chief executive of California-based Proteus Digital Health.

"The biggest burdens in our health system are about chronic disease, and people typically who have some type of chronic disease need to take medicines every day. And they need to take them appropriately.

"And what we know is that most people don't actually do that very well."

So how do you make sure your elderly and forgetful mum is taking her medication regularly?

According to Proteus, by having that tablet text or even tweet you when it hits the stomach.

This isn't science fiction - although the company appropriately enough shares its name with the Proteus, the microscopic vessel that boldly went where none of us have gone before - inside the human body - in the cult 1960s movie Fantastic Voyage.
Small packages: The Proteus ingestible sensor next to a normal drawing pin, to show scale

The key is a tiny ingestible sensor that can be embedded in a tablet. It works like a potato battery.

"If you stick a bit of copper and a bit of magnesium in a potato and you wire it up you can power a lightbulb. It's a simple bit of chemistry that says two dissimilar metals in an ionic solution create an electrical charge," says Mr Thomson.

"What we have done is to take two absolutely required dietary minerals, one is copper and one is magnesium, and put them on a grain of sand that's less than a millimetre square in a way that means that when we combine it with a drug, when you swallow it you become a potato."

The ionic fluid is stomach acid. Enough voltage is created to power the sensor, which communicates with a small plaster-shaped patch worn by the patient, which also tracks vital signs, movement and sleep.

The patch in turn sends all of this data to an application which lives in the cloud. It can be accessed from a smartphone, tablet or PC, and set to send an alert to family, caregivers or healthcare professionals to say the pills have been swallowed.

This is particularly important where the timing is crucial or where missing a few doses means the drug won't work anymore.
The band aid shaped patch worn by the patient, which communicates with the Helius app shown on the tablet

"Effectively when you swallow one of our digital drugs it will say, Hello I'm here, I'm Novartis, I'm Diovan, 1.2mg, I'm from plant number 76, I'm batch number 12 and I'm pill number 2." says Mr Thomson.

The application can also track the drug's effects - whether it's been prescribed at the right dosage, or if it simply isn't working.

The technology is being piloted in the UK at High Street chain Lloyds Pharmacy. Patients receive a labelled dosage tray, with an extra pill that contains the sensor. This will record the time each dose is taken, while the tracking patch builds up a picture of their health and movements.

"If you think about a hypertension patient who doesn't take their medicines, the long term result of that will be things like a stroke or a heart attack which may cost the health system tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars," says Mr Thomson.

"And the cost of the medicines is 30p a month. One of the most important things to understand here is that helping people appropriately use medicines has the potential to save hundreds of millions of pounds."

From BBC