Smart capsules for sensing and sampling the gut: status, challenges and prospects

Abstract

Smart capsules are developing at a tremendous pace with a promise to become effective clinical tools for the diagnosis and monitoring of gut health. This field emerged in the early 2000s with a successful translation of an endoscopic capsule from laboratory prototype to a commercially viable clinical device. Recently, this field has accelerated and expanded into various domains beyond imaging, including the measurement of gut physiological parameters such as temperature, pH, pressure and gas sensing, and the development of sampling devices for better insight into gut health. In this review, the status of smart capsules for sensing gut parameters is presented to provide a broad picture of these state-of-the-art devices while focusing on the technical and clinical challenges the devices need to overcome to realise their value in clinical settings. Smart capsules are developed to perform sensing operations throughout the length of the gut to better understand the body’s response under various conditions. Furthermore, the prospects of such sensing devices are discussed that might help readers, especially health practitioners, to adapt to this inevitable transformation in healthcare. As a compliment to gut sensing smart capsules, significant amount of effort has been put into the development of robotic capsules to collect tissue biopsy and gut microbiota samples to perform in-depth analysis after capsule retrieval which will be a game changer for gut health diagnosis, and this advancement is also covered in this review. The expansion of smart capsules to robotic capsules for gut microbiota collection has opened new avenues for research with a great promise to revolutionise human health diagnosis, monitoring and intervention.

Nanotechnology’s frontier in combatting infectious and inflammatory diseases: prevention and treatment

“…For instance, nanotechnology has been integrated with “smart capsule” technology for the purpose of monitoring intestinal health. 736 These recent advancements and future directions will offer greater convenience for the detection and diagnosis of infectious and inflammatory diseases.…”

Pilot Study: Safety and Performance Validation of an Ingestible Medical Device for Collecting Small Intestinal Liquid in Healthy Volunteers

“…This smart pill was a sophisticated programmable capsule that obtained a CE marking. Since then, other projects have emerged as reviewed elsewhere (Rehan et al, [29]). To sample the human microbiome in a noninvasive way and in vivo, Pelican Health has developed an ingestible device that contains no electronics and that has the unique ability to collect three samples at a time.…”

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The gut microbiome in disorders of gut–brain interaction

“… 39–45 We have found that the absence of gut microbiota increases visceral sensitivity to colorectal distention through elevated production of calcitonin gene-related peptide (CGRP) by dorsal root ganglia (DRG) neurons in a sex-dependent manner. 46 Besides the use of gnotobiotic mouse models, the incorporation of modern techniques such as whole genome and targeted metagenomic sequencing, 47 , 48 as well as the use of ingestible sampling devices, 49 , 50 have aided our understanding of gut microbial influence on health and disease.…”