RFID, GPS Technology and Electronic Surveillance

Smart Pill Reports Back

April 7, 2010

Technology Review - The medicine cabinet of the future could help make sure patients take their medications on time via a myriad of smart technologies. There are already pill bottles that wirelessly report to a computer when a cap has been opened, and devices for automatically dispensing medicine at the right time, and for reminding patients to take their meds.

Now researchers at the University of Florida have engineered a smart pill with a tiny antenna and microchip that could signal when it has made it into a patient's stomach--reporting to a cell phone or computer that she has taken her medicine. Their design is the latest of several high-tech pill-reporting efforts to improve patient adherence and provide accurate reporting.

The prototype pill is composed of a standard pill capsule, wrapped in a thin label etched in silver nano-ink, comprising an antenna. The team also outfitted the label with a tiny microchip, which can be loaded with sensors to detect measurements like body temperature or pH levels. Both the antenna and microchip communicate with an external transmitter, which researchers say could be fashioned into a wearable device such as a wristband. The transmitter sends low frequency pulses into the body; the pill's antenna tunes into the transmitter's specific frequency, and sends pulses back, along with data collected from the microchip, potentially including the time when the patient ingested the pill, and the type of pill taken.

Daniel Touchette, assistant professor of pharmacy practice at the University of Illinois at Chicago, studies the use of technology to improve patient compliance.

"With tuberculosis or mental illness, where you want to make sure they're taking the meds, this system would make sure people are taking their meds, and potentially cut down on nursing time," says Touchette, who was not involved in the research.

Such smart pills could also help pharmaceutical companies test new drugs. Currently, the main way companies can keep track of whether subjects take a given drug or placebo is through patient diaries, which can be easily doctored to skew a drug trial's results. To counter this, companies test the drug on very large populations of subjects in order to get statistically relevant results, which can get expensive.

Rizwan Bashirullah, assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of Florida, says pills that report back when ingested could significantly improve a drug trial's accuracy, and potentially cut costs. He and his colleagues have spun off a company, eTect, to further develop the smart pill system and market it to pharmaceutical companies.

"The vision for this would be to create something you could stick on a capsule on a large scale manufacturing basis," says Bashirullah. "The same way you do a label on a Tylenol pill, we're envisioning a printing system where they print thousand of pills a second."

Bashirullah says one big advantage of the smart pill is that it doesn't require an onboard battery. Instead, the pill's antenna picks up the transmitter's low frequency energy. The team has so far tested the smart pill in models that simulate the electrical properties of a human body. They were able to find a low frequency signal that elicited a response from the pill's antenna within a few milliseconds.

Maysam Ghovanloo, assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering at Georgia Institute of Technology, has designed a similar smart pill that contains a tiny magnet. A magnetic necklace worn by a patient creates a magnetic field only when it detects the magnetized pill in the digestive tract. And a company called Proteus Biomedical has designed a smart pill tagged with a chemical that reacts with stomach acid to produce an electrical signal that can be transmitted to an external receiver.

Ghovanloo says both these competing designs employ relatively passive external receivers.

"The burden is on the pill to announce and identify itself," says Ghovanloo.

In contrast, the University of Florida's design relies more on the external transmitter to send signals, searching for the presence of a pill.

"The question is, how much energy can you store in that wristwatch to be sufficient," says Ghovanloo. "If they resolve that issue, the advantage would be the simplicity and small size of the pill."

As a power solution, Bashirullah says the system could be paired with other technologies, such as automated reminders from cellphones that could momentarily turn on the external transmitter to search for the presence of a pill.

"It has to be integrated with other technologies," says Bashirullah. "There's certainly going to be power constraints, and that's something we're looking at now."

The Perils of Public Surveillance

April 7, 2010

Singularity Hub - ... Traffic cameras are part of a larger trend towards surveillance of public places. There are millions of CCTV cameras up in the UK, with a million in London alone. The EU is pursuing vast programs for continually monitoring online activities. The US has its own history with wire-tapping, phone-mining, and other surveillance systems. Private companies, every entity from mega corporations down to the local corner store, have cameras up and recording business. Most of these endeavors are supposed to make things safer.

Whether or not they are successful depends on the situation. As we discussed before, the CCTV cameras in London haven’t been seen as a dependable criminal deterrent. The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (US) asserts that traffic cameras reduce fatal and nonfatal intersection collisions. Of course, there are detractors (and supporters) for all of the claims around these technologies. There’s too much data to try to wade through in one post. I will venture to say that these technologies aren’t perfect, but that they have some potential for stopping crime and preventing accidents.

What happens when they do become perfect? Triggering precision and camera speeds have been increasing for years (even your hand held digital camera is pretty amazing) and will probably continue to do so. Already we’ve seen advanced software packages for sale that will help turn hours and hours of CCTV camera footage into useful clips. We’ll have better monitoring systems and the processing techniques to help us use it.

Even if you think that today’s surveillance technology doesn’t work well enough now, it’s hard to argue that it won’t ever become better. And they’re likely to become cheaper as well. Eventually we could place surveillance video cameras on every corner of every street. If there was a nearly 100% chance of getting caught, stopping violations might end overnight. Today’s system is surely flawed in some ways, but anyone should be able to envision a system with very real benefits.

So it really all comes down to privacy. That and the gut-response to learning that some observations of the law (if not its enforcement) will be handled by computers instead of humans.

Are these concerns enough to stop the use of public surveillance? Many countries throughout Europe already have traffic cameras in use. They’re also fairly common in Pennsylvania and California. Red-light cameras, however, are banned in Mississippi and West Virginia. There are numerous lawsuits over their use in Florida, and Arizona has reported many instances of vandalism and, sadly, murder.

Every region is likely to make its own choice about the degree it will accept public surveillance. And immediate success doesn’t seem to be the defining factor that dictates how a region will approach the subject. It’s more likely that the people in each nation/state/city will decide on how to accept public surveillance based on their own conceptions of privacy and law enforcement.

The UK and London seems to be dedicated to its CCTV program for the long haul. Faced with a disappointing start they’re developing (along with the EC) the means by which to make their system more effective.

Which should prove an interesting endeavor as technology gets even deeper into our lives and our bodies. Monitoring street corners is child’s play. Some day every car will have automatic GPS guidance, probably even automatic driving. Will that be supervised?

Later our bodies will be completely monitored for our health, and we may be using our brains to directly interface with computers. How will we even conceive of public vs. private spaces when we spend most of our lives interacting online?

While there may be large regions of the world that never adopt government use of public surveillance, there are certain to be many areas that do. Moreover, it doesn’t take a government to perform public surveillance. As we’ve said time and again, privacy is dying a slow death, or at least undergoing a metamorphosis. Cameras are getting smaller, cheaper, easier to use, and any private company can put them up around their place of business. Google software reads your emails and tracks your searches to provide you with pinpointed ads. Facebook users share personal information with huge networks of “friends” and Twitter broadcasts your activities into the online aether. Faced with these changes in our perception of monitoring, it seems likely that a good deal of us, probably a majority, will eventually accept traffic cameras as just another part of modern life.

Public surveillance isn’t completely effective yet, and it’s certainly not completely accepted, but it’s growing. The rise of 24/7 monitoring may not be unstoppable, but it will take a lot more than a little controversy to slow it down. Considering how rapidly technology is changing our lives, the big debates are still to come ...