Swallowable Wearables Set to Replace Fitness Trackers

MIT recently announced developing a wearable device that can be rolled into a swallowable capsule to measure body temperature and heart rates from ‘the inside’.

It comes as a respite to many people out there who admire the idea of keeping up with their health and fitness conditions but cannot stand for a minute a device strapped somewhere to their body.

The wearable technology doesn’t seem to reach its Zenith. We’ve seen the whole evolution process, right from plate-size smatwatches to ordinary-looking necklaces through to screenless wristbands and pint-sized in-ear trackers, and now… something swallowable?

According to the researchers behind it, this method of fitness tracking sports unparalleled accuracy and can measure two different body vibrations discretely. “Through characterisation of the acoustic wave, recorded from different parts of the GI tract, we found that we could measure both heart rate and respiratory rate with good accuracy,” said Giovanni Traverso, lead researcher of the project, during a press release.

Basically the swallowable sensor is a tiny ‘stethoscope’, the size of a multivitamin pill, with a microphone and all electronics needed to send signals to an external receiver. The device remains in the digestive tract for a maximum two days, and the patient has the choice of when to swallow another capsule.