Chip and pill

The Californian  group, Porteus Digital health has developed  the first “digital pill” that tell doctors when their patients have taken them – had its drug application accepted by US regulators.

This chip in the pill will ensure patients stick to their prescriptions and reduce the wasteful spending on drugs that are not taken properly. This will be boon to patients with mental illness and memory disorders like Schizophrenia and Alzheimer’s where the correct medicine consumption is very poor.

The digital health companies has already attracted £1.82bn, $2.8bn of investment in the first half of this year, compared to last year’s £4.47bn,  $6.9bn according to Start-up Health, a research company.

Mr.  Andrew Thompson is President, Chief Executive Officer and co-founder of Proteus Digital Health led the company since inception and his vision for Digital Medicine is focused on expanding global access to care, dramatically increasing the value delivered by drugs and creating a sustainable model for innovation that leverages the mobile internet in healthcare and committed to improve the state of the world. According to  Andrew Thompson CEO of Porteus digital, the US Food and Drug Administration has agreed to review its device, which is embedded in a schizophrenia medicine pill made by Otsuka of Japan. This new regulatory reforms allows the pharmaceuticals industry to incorporate  innovation in software and medical science.

The smart pill contains ingestible sensor that detects when the drug has reached the stomach, which can communicate with a wearable patch stuck to a patient’s skin that transmits the information to a mobile device. This vital information could provide real time monitoring of patient health and determine if the treatment is working.