Redwood City Company Designs Ingestible Sensors

Taking a page from the Magic School Bus, a Redwood City-based company is putting human-powered sensors inside of a pill, and raising millions of dollars in funding from Silicon Valley investors to do it. 

Proteus Digital Health is a startup that is creating ingestible sensors, which are designed to help people monitor their health. The Proteus pill has a sensor inside of it that detects the conditions inside the body and sends the information via a patch worn on the skin. The patch is synced with the pill taker’s smart phone, which displays the information for the pill taker. That information can be shared with doctors, family members, or anyone else who is invested in taking care of that person.

Remarkably, the pill uses the human body as the power source, in the same way that a potato powers a light bulb. Each side pill has copper and magnesium on the surface. When they interact stomach acids, the power that emerges is used to charge the pill.

The company raised $62.5 million in Series F financing in May from corporations such as Oracle, Novartis, and Sino Portolio. The privately-held company is also funded by Kaiser Permanente and Medtronic.

The concept of ingestible sensors could be a game changer for the health care industry, especially for people who are on strict medicine regimens that require monitoring.  As the country rethinks the healthcare industry, emerging technologies such as this one could play a role in the type of health care coverage that is offered to senior citizens, or people with chronic conditions that require consumption of multiple medications. 

The company’s Vice President of Corporate Development will be delivering a talk about the Proteus pill at the 2013 Wearable Technologies Conference in San Francisco in July. Find out more information about that conference here.