An electronic tablet running on gastric juice has been created

Nikolay Vorontsov, N+1

Engineers from The Massachusetts Institute of Technology, together with doctors at Brigham Women's Hospital, have developed a prototype of an indigestible electronic tablet that can generate electricity when exposed to gastric acid. MIT News (Engineers harness stomach acid to power tiny sensors) briefly talks about the development.

Electronic tablets are one of the promising directions in modern medicine. As a rule, this is the name of swallowed metered-dose drug delivery devices, as well as diagnostic electronic devices in a soft shell, which are designed to collect information. Among the problems that the developers of electronic tablets solve, there is also the problem of power supply – using your own battery increases the dimensions of the electronic tablet and limits the duration of work inside the body.

A prototype developed by engineers from MIT with a length of 40 millimeters and a diameter of 12 millimeters allows you to abandon the built-in battery. Instead, the electronic tablet needs gastric acid, which is used to generate electricity – the developers have built zinc and copper electrodes into the surface of the electronic tablet, which, when immersed in an acidic environment, begin to work as a galvanic cell. 

The generated electricity, the authors note, is enough, for example, to power a temperature sensor and a wireless transmitter. In the experiments conducted on pigs, an electronic tablet successfully transmitted data every 12 seconds to a base station located at a distance of two meters, and the time of passage through the gastrointestinal tract was six days. According to the authors, when moving into the small intestine, the efficiency of the galvanic cell drops a hundred times, but this can be compensated by a corresponding decrease in the frequency of sending data.

In the future, developers suggest using such galvanic cells to power other indigestible medical devices. For example, for the dosed distribution of medicines for a long time, researchers suggest using capsules made of gold foil.

Previously, for personalized pharmacology , it was also proposed to print the tablets themselves on a 3D printer - depending on the shape of the resulting tablet, different rates of release of drugs in the patient's body can be achieved.

Portal "Eternal youth" http://vechnayamolodost.ru  08.02.2017