Some of us are great about making sure we take important meds in a timely manner, others of us are awful about it. Imagine if there was a way for a healthcare provider to keep track of who was, and who wasn’t, taking their medications. A new FDA approved method does just that by monitoring your insides and relaying information back to a healthcare provider. This system works through a special pill made by Proteus Digital Health, which uses an ultra-tiny sand-particle-sized silicon chip on a pill. The idea is that the digestive process would signal a patch on the person’s skin and would then relay a message to a mobile phone given to a healthcare provider.

At the moment this method is only approved for use on placebos, making its uses very limited, but soon the company could get approval for a wider range of drugs. Honestly there is something a little unnerving about a pill that monitors you and tattle-tells on you, but I suppose this could be very important for those with serious physical and mental illnesses that absolutely need controlled monitoring. This is an important innovation, even if a little on the strange side, but it won’t truly be of any use until Proteus can manage to get FDA approval on a wider range of drugs. For now, having it as a placebo at least opens the drug up for testing to ensure it truly works like it is supposed to. What do you think of a drug that monitors whether you are taking it or not?

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