Wouldn’t it be cool if NZT was real?  You know, the pill from the Bradley Cooper movie Limitless that unlocks the full potential of the brain, allowing a person to develop into the perfect version of himself?  Without the side effects, of course.

There’s no telling if a drug like that already exists in one of the government’s experimental labs, but if it does, it would be life changing.  Lucky for us, there’s plenty of initiatives taking place that are working on developing pills that could very well change your life in ways you never would have imagined.

Smart Pills

• ePill

Proteus, a British company that specializes in microelectronics, created the ePill, a pill that gathers information from inside your body then transmits the data to a patch you wear on your skin, like an electronic tattoo.  It doesn’t have an internal battery as it uses your stomach’s juices to power it.

The point of the ePill is to monitor a patient’s medication intake, such as what time meds are being taken, or if they’re being taken at all, and if the patient is responding to the medication.  It is also aimed to help people with physical and neurological problems; people with heart failure-related difficulties could monitor blood flow and body temperature; those with central nervous system issues, including schizophrenia and Alzheimer’s disease, could take the pills to monitor vital signs in real time.

The patch stores all these data points as well as the patient’s heart rate, temperature, daily activity and rest patterns, aside from the things happening inside the person’s body.  ePill was approved by the Food and Drug Authority last year.

• CoreTemp

Another life changing pill is the CorTemp Ingestible Core Body Temperature Sensor, made by HQ Inc. in Palmetto, FL.  It takes the core temperature of a person and transmits the data wirelessly.  The pill has been used by firefighters, football players, soldiers and astronauts, so their employers can monitor their body temp and prevent them from overheating.

CorTemp started as a research in 2006 and the company hopes that in the next year, it will be available for consumers in general and will be able to transmit data wirelessly to smartphone apps.

Smart Tattoos

Google announced last month that it is working on technology that aims to transform human beings into the ultimate passwords, using electronic tattoos.  The smart tattoo is like a sticker that people can attach to their skin and would allow them to unlock their phones without having to enter the password or passcode, and even allow them to unlock their cars or homes without a key.

MC10 sees smart tattoos as something that can improve the well-being of a person in other ways.  It can be put on clothes or directly on the skin to collect data such as heart rate, temperature, hydration levels and even brain activity.  It can even be fitted on to catheter balloons to gather information inside a person.  The stretchable electronics can wirelessly transmit data in real-time to a smartphone or computer or even directly to their physician’s device over the web.

Researchers at MC10 are also looking into extending the functions of these stretchable electronics to ablate cancerous or diseased tissues, or be able to be implanted directly on the brain, without doing harm, to sense or stop seizures before they happen.

Smart needles

Microneedles, about 400 µm, are hard to see with the naked eye – so small, in fact, you probably wouldn’t even notice if you got pricked with one.  These needles are currently being used to deliver painless vaccinations in mice, and will soon be tested on humans.  Some potential use cases extend to cosmetics, and even to make skin soft and supple or deal with acne.

But researchers want to equip micorneedles with sensors to monitor a person’s bloodstream to detect anomalies.  Researchers at North Carolina State University, Sandia National Laboratories, and the University of California, San Diego, published a paper about the use of microneedles for real-time detection of chemical changes in the body such as metabolic acidosis.

Sano Intelligence is looking for a way to make these sensor-laced microneedles available in a patch or on a wristwatch, or anything a person can wear without any discomfort. This way it can continuously collect data from the bloodstream and transmit that data wirelessly to a computer or a smartphone.

This could help people monitor their health, especially those with metabolic conditions, to avoid fatal circumstances.

Too invasive?

The future seems to hold promising technologies but they also seem quite invasive, no matter how small they are.  They aim to better understand your body so that your physician or healthcare provider can give you the best treatment possible.

But do we really need to know everything that’s going on inside out body?  As John Perry Barlow, a founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, puts it, “This is yet another one of these technologies where there are wonderful options and terrible options, simultaneously.  The wonderful is that there are a great number of things you want to know about yourself on a continual basis, especially if you’re diabetic or suffer from another disease. The terrible is that health insurance companies could know about the inner workings of your body.”

Time and circumstances will determine how this technology is commercialized and implemented  sparking new standards across several industries that will all be more data-conscious whether we like it or not.

photo credit: pumpkincat210 via photopin cc

Make sure you check out our collection of Smart Body on Springpad!