Indigestible Sensor used to improve Childre's Health

The Proteus Discover digital health system uses an ingestible sensor embedded in a pill to record data about – among other things – patients’ medication adherence. The sensor sends data to an adhesive patch, which in turn sends it to a mobile device. But what are the use cases that require that kind of precision and reliability?

For the Children’s Health, a system of pediatric hospitals in the Dallas, Texas area, they turned to an ingestible sensor when other kinds of remote monitoring weren’t quite getting the job done for a population of post-organ transplant teenagers.

“What happens when you’re 15 or 16?” Julie Hall-Barrow, the vice president of virtual health and innovation at Children’s Health said this week at the Digital and Personal Connected Health conference at HIMSS17. “You want to start driving, making decisions, you’re independent, your mother is not on your hip 24-7. But the problem with this population is their mother had to be on their hip 24-7. It’s an extreme disease that requires a lot of regimen, and for a lot of kids the transition from Mom or Dad doing these things to doing it themselves is the transition from child to adult. And they have to do it, but there’s got to be a better way.”


For younger transplant patients, it sufficed to ask the parents whether they had taken their medication. But adolescent patients were much more likely to forget and to say they had taken their pills just to get the alarm to stop.

To read more: Check out Jonah Comstock on Mobile Health News