This futuristic pill senses signs of disease inside the body, then sends a wireless alert to a phone
In the 1966 science fiction classic "Fantastic Voyage," a submarine crew is miniaturized so it can squeeze inside a human body and travel to a hot spot where medical assistance is needed.
A team from MIT has adapted this idea for real life, replacing the shrunken squad with specially engineered E. coli bacteria and pairing them with a suite of electronics that fit neatly inside an ingestible pill.
They call their creation an IMBED — short for ingestible micro-bioelectronic device — and used it to detect excess blood in the stomachs of pigs. After finding blood, the capsule sent a wireless signal from within the pig's body that was read by a smartphone and a laptop computer.
