Drs. Mehmet Girayhan Say, first author, and Giovanni Traverso, senior author.
Swallow, Dissolve, Notify: MIT’s Bioresorbable Smart Pill That Doesn’t Have a Battery
By: Daya Stevens
Anyone managing a long list of medications or enduring weeks of round-the-clock antibiotics knows how easy it is to miss a dose. For certain patient populations, like those with tuberculosis, organ transplants, HIV, or neurological conditions, missing a dose could be catastrophic.
Imagine a pill that notifies your healthcare providers exactly when you take your medication. That was the goal of researchers at MIT—to create a bioresorbable, non-battery-powered pill that confirms when a dose is ingested.
“Our group really aims to transform what we can do for patients so that they can live their best lives,” says Dr. Giovanni Traverso, a principal investigator in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).
The pill contains an RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) antenna that, due to its signal-blocking coating, can only be read once it reaches its target site. The coating and the antenna are bioresorbable, meaning they are made from materials that can safely be ingested, broken down, and absorbed by the body over time. The coating acts as a Faraday cage to block the RF signal. The RFID system is “similar to the systems that are present in either a credit card when you’re paying, for example, that now you can touch a screen or a reader for it to then charge,” Dr. Traverso explains.
The idea is that once the pill reaches the stomach, the coating dissolves and the tag radiation becomes active and can be read by an external reader (like a watch), which picks up the RF signal and stores or sends the data to healthcare providers. The researchers named their device; “SAFARI: Smart Adherence via FARaday cage And Resorbable Ingestible).
Dr. Traverso, a gastroenterologist and biomedical engineer, acknowledges that ingestible sensors can be a concern to patients and environmentalists. He reiterated that the goal of SAFARI was to help “in a way that maximizes safety with respect to the size of the object, but also has a favorable environmental impact.”
Digital management of medication adherence could mitigate common challenges such as unreliable self-reporting patients may face when managing complex medication regimens independently. These issues extend beyond clinical trials into routine care and real-world settings. Effective adherence-monitoring strategies have the potential to both enhance therapeutic outcomes and reduce the risk of highly addictive drugs.
Funding disclosure: Research referenced in this article was supported by the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H) under Award Number D24AC00040-00.
