Cancer patients and their doctors face numerous hurdles throughout treatment. One of the biggest problems is making sure that they take their medications.
When chemotherapy patients leave the hospital to continue their treatment at home, doctors like Edward Greeno, a professor at the University of Minnesota Medical School's Department of Medicine, can no longer be sure that his patients are taking their medicine.
To combat the issue of medication nonadherence, University of Minnesota Health and Fairview Health Services are pioneering the use of tiny, digestible sensors that allow doctors to track their patients' health.
Greeno and other doctors at the Masonic Cancer Clinic at the University of Minnesota Health Clinics and Surgery Center have recently started prescribing pills embedded with small, ingestible sensors. Designed by California-based Proteus Digital Health, the sensors are about the size of a grain of sand and monitor things like heart rate, activity level and sleep cycle.
After the patient takes the pill, information is transmitted to a small patch on the patient's stomach, which then connects to a mobile app that both the patient and their doctor can access.
"When we give people chemotherapy in the clinic with an intravenous drug, we're able to assess the dose and timing and make sure they're well enough to continue treatment," Greeno told the Washington Post. "But when you send them home with a bottle of pills, you don't know when they're taking them or if they're well enough to take them."
Ingestible technology is relatively new to the healthcare field. "Smart pills" were approved by the FDA in 2017, and have been used to help patients manage medications for a variety of diseases, including diabetes and hypertension. The University of Minnesota is the first to experiment with digital pills and cancer care.
This new technology will allow doctors to ensure patients are taking the medications as prescribed, which doesn't always happen – even when with serious treatments like chemotherapy.
A 2014 study by the National Center for Biotechnology Information found that approximately 30 to 50 percent of U.S. adults are not adherent to long-term medications, leading to an estimated $100 billion in preventable costs annually.
University doctors have been combining sensors with chemo pills since September, according to the Star Tribune. Around 177,000 Proteus digital sensors have been swallowed to date.
