Andy Thompson, CEO of Proteus Digital Health, came up with an idea that brings AI and the healthcare together. He invented the world’s first pill with microchip that tracks your health. The tiny microchip has to be taken together with the medicine and is able to gather data about the effectivity and safety of the related medicine. The microchip is coupled to a smart system where the consumer can see their personal data and get reminders when to take the drug. The sensors in the microchip detect effects of the medicine as high adherence or negative side-effects. As a consequence, a huge amount of costs and even deaths can be reduced. The World Health Organization (WHO) estimated that in developed countries, 50% of patients that are chronically ill experiences non-adherence of medicines. For instance, in the US this amount is approximated around 25%-50% and causes around 125.000 deaths annually.
Moreover, healthcare providers that have permission to gain insight into the data, can work with more efficacy. The doctors are better able to prescribe treatments and prevent unnecessary bad health outcomes. As depicted in the picture below, the microchip is inserted into a capsule of the drug and will eventually transfer the data to a wearable sensor patch (Kleinsmith, 2022).
So, I am curious, have you ever heard of this and what are your thoughts of it?
Sources
Kleinsmith, N. a. P. S., 2022. Proteus Digital Health: Healthcare for Everyone, Everywhere, Rotterdam: s.n.
Thank you for the intersting post Xinran!
The numbers reported by the WHO on non-adherence to prescribed medicine is frighteningly large.
Indeed for both the consumers (adherence to medicine) both also for the the pharmaceuticals this chip could be of great value for 2 reasons.
In my opinion pharmaceuticals have an estimation on how effective the medicines are. If provided by actual data, the estimated data and the real data can be tested and more transparant data can be shared!
Moreover, the data could be leveraged by pharmaceuticals to increase the effectiveness of their medicines by e.g. doing research in which cases the medicines did not work or including this chip with other biometrics to monitor health.