Stomach sensor stays in place by swelling to size of a ping-pong ball

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Engineers at MIT have designed an ingestible sensor that swells to the size of a ping-pong ball and continuously tracks conditions in the stomach for up to 30 days.

ping-pong
The ingestible hydrogel device swells in water with high speed and high ratio (Pic: Xinyue Liu)

If the pill needs to be removed from the stomach, a patient can drink a solution of calcium that triggers the pill to quickly shrink to its original size and pass out of the body.

The new pill is made from a combination of two hydrogels that quickly swell in the stomach and remain impervious to the stomach's churning acidic environment.

"The dream is to have a Jell-O-like [gelatin] smart pill, that once swallowed stays in the stomach and monitors the patient's health for a long time such as a month," said Xuanhe Zhao, associate professor of mechanical engineering at MIT.

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