The Digital Pill: Medical Miracle or Marketing Microspy?

(CC) Erich Ferdinand/Flickr

One Person’s “Digital Medicine” is Another’s “Digital Manipulation”

From the world of medical technology comes now the ingestible digital sensor, which is either: (a) a historic stride toward more effective, appropriate and individually tailored health care; (b) a frankly unnerving precedent that brings us closer to a state of medical Big Brotherism; or (c) both.

We’ll start with the facts. The ingestible sensor itself is composed mostly of silicon, is no bigger than a grain of sand, and is just part of a larger monitoring system which, at this point in development, is designed to track when and how often patients take their pills. The idea is that a sensor is placed inside each pill, and when you swallow one, it descends into your stomach, where digestive chemicals act upon little conductive materials to briefly power the sensor. This enables it to send a tiny signal through the body to a patch worn on the patient’s skin, which in turn records the time the pill was taken.

Its task within you completed, the sensor then passes through your body in the same fashion as other transient material. The company that makes the sensor calls this “end-to-end personal health management,” evidently with a straight face. That company, by the way, is Proteus Digital Health, located, unsurprisingly, just north of Silicon Valley. I say that because this minuscule device is not a medical achievement, like a new surgical procedure or drug, but a technological achievement which happens to have a medical application.

An application which, on the one hand, could literally be a lifesaver to persons on serious medication. That’s because a lot of vital meds become ineffective, and in some cases lethal, if not taken at the right times and in the right quantities. It’s important that doctors be able to monitor how and when certain patients are taking their medication — that’s why the aforementioned skin patch is empowered to transmit the data on to doctors or caregivers via cellphone app.

And therein lies the possibility of the sensor becoming (b), above. Because although the sensor at present just signals that you’ve taken a pill, the makers point out that its “feedback” system can also measure and report your heart rate and metabolism, your physical activity level and even your bodily position. And as we know with technology, that’s probably just the beginning.

Within a few years there will most likely be little grain-sized sensors that can transmit data on everything from your favorite dessert to how recently you had sex and with whom and whether you liked it. A lot of the things that sensors will be able to sense are things you may consider to be nobody else’s business.

Now — Proteus may be a fine and conscientious company with no ulterior motives or history thereof; they did get FDA approval for the sensor, after all. But they were merely the first of what will probably be a rush of sensor-providers from other tech companies, whose ethics might not be so scrupulous.

That’s the problem with Silicon Valley innovators: they haven’t the best reputation or track record when it comes to respecting and protecting their customers’ personal rights and privacy. The co-founder of Proteus calls the FDA’s okay an “important milestone,” and it almost certainly is, but in what? The march toward a more effective, comprehensive and personalized era in health care? Or toward the ultimate in invasive commercialism, where people routinely receive text-messages to the effect that, for example, “It’s 85 degrees outside and your core temperature is rising, and you haven’t had a beverage in 3.7 hours. Wouldn’t a nice cool Bud hit the spot right now?”

A sensor the size of a grain of sand can be inserted, totally undetectably, in almost anything a human might consume, and could certainly be modified to attach itself to the stomach lining where, powered by your body, it could happily transmit information about you to sources unidentified for years on end. (Our Voyager spacecraft, launched in 1977, is still doing just that, from a deep space environment considerably more hostile than your digestive tract.) The commercial potential is enormous… and ominous.

How much do you think, offhand, that McDonald’s might pay for a service that would let it know whenever anyone anywhere was experiencing a low level of leptin, the hormone that inhibits our feelings of hunger, enabling the company to text: “Boy, a double bacon cheese burger with fries sounds good, doesn’t it? Did you know there’s a Golden Arches just 241.3 yards away? (Click Directions for GPS map.) And we’re also having a special on McNuggets!”

Of course, it’s always possible that the food and beverage and related industries would decline the opportunity to invade our bodies and mine them for data to move more product out of a sense of simple ethical and human decency. Right.

L, as they say, OL.

(By Robert S. Wieder for CalorieLab Calorie Counter News):

Ed. note: Enjoyed this post? Click the “Like” button below and be sure to “Like” the CalorieLab Facebook page.

The Digital Pill: Medical Miracle or Marketing Microspy? is a post from: CalorieLab - Health News & Information Blog

Source: http://calorielab.com/news/2012/08/24/digital-pill/

paleo diet chinese diet tea hcg diet recipes diet program diet for idiots