Innovation of the week: A smart pill that knows when it's been swallowed

This new technology was created to prevent people from forgetting to take their medicine.

There's now medicine that knows whether you're following the doctor's orders, said Stephanie M. Lee at BuzzFeed. Silicon Valley's Proteus Digital Health makes a "smart pill" that wirelessly alerts an app after it's been swallowed. The pill uses "digestible sensors" made from copper and magnesium that react with stomach acid "to send a tiny electrical signal," which is picked up by a Band Aid–like patch worn on the skin.

That patch then alerts the Proteus app, which can send reminders to both the patient and doctor if a dose is missed. Proteus executives say their goal is to "fix a long-standing and often fatal problem": missed medication, which causes about 125,000 deaths annually in the United States alone. Privacy advocates, however, worry that a new era of wireless health could usher in "unparalleled new forms of surveillance."

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