Internet of Body: The Next Big Thing for Medical

Estimated reading time: 14 minutes

The second one is the kids. I like to know what my monkeys are doing and if they are fine. The problem with this thing is that it opens a new era of privacy. It’s a new meaning because you can be hacked. Two weeks ago, there was a Bloomberg Businessweek magazine story with what happened to Apple and Amazon, and that’s another story. Now we are overwhelmed because somebody can find these things out about you. If not for bad reasons—for lack of better words—then for life insurance. You have your whole life in a data center somewhere.

There is still time until this becomes a reality. I’m still concerned about my privacy. I’m not doing anything special or wrong, but I’m still concerned. If I look at my daughters, they don’t care; they post everything everywhere—it doesn’t matter. With this approach, if you give it to kids first, they will grow up and, as adults, will say, “Sure. I’d like to know what happened to my heartbeat in the last 24 hours.” It’s another approach.

Johnson: Not only do we have the possibility of invasiveness around data privacy, but IoB starts to touch on a number of different ways of connecting to the body.

Botos: IoB would become successful the moment you forget you have that attachment. Today, it’s still bulky. You still have to put it on, pull it off at night, and eventually charge it. That is still a threshold that many people have to go above or surpass to accept the technology.

The moment it touched your skin, like a sticker, you could forget about it. You could have it there for weeks, months, or even more, and you wouldn’t have to do anything. You could shower and maybe even swim. That will be a true application for IoB.

Johnson: Do you see IoB moving into implantables?

Botos: Yes. It’s already there.

Johnson: I could easily see a pacemaker doing something like that or an implantable blood sugar monitor.

Botos: Yes. The other class I was talking about besides patches is implantables. I saw it last year at the Wearable Technologies Conference in San Francisco where you could have a glass-based encapsulated pill if you want. It’s a near field communication (NFC) tag that you put under your skin, and from that moment, you can start paying with your hand. You can identify yourself to a tag or a door: “Yes, I am Titu. Here I am.” That’s a completely different class. It has a higher class in the medical industry because it has to survive inside your body and should have as little of an effect on your body as possible. The first implant I saw was encapsulated in medical-grade sterile glass.

The other class of IoB devices would be the ingestible ones. You swallow it as a pill, and it has two purposes. First, it’s sensor-based as in it goes, stays in your body for about 24 hours or so, and it collects data as it travels through your digestive tract. You have a receiver on your body somewhere very close because the energy is low like a patch. It transmits that, and when it goes out, it’s basically disposable.

The other scope for this digestible would be to deliver drugs to the right place. Yes, invasively entering the bloodstream is one way—the old way; for example, with something like insulin, we cannot have it as a pill. There have been hundreds of trials where they try to convert insulin into a pill so you can take a pill instead of taking a shot every time you need it. It’s much easier to swallow, but it’s proven that the digestive tract is breaking the insulin into pieces, so that is not the drug anymore.

The point is to have a vehicle that will deliver that insulin intact, so it can do what it was meant to do. That would help, but recognize that it’s a third class. We hope blind people will start to see one day. We have a project in our labs, but it’s still far away from taking somebody from the street and having them regain their vision the next day—that day is still very, very far off.

Johnson: What are some of your customers’ biggest challenges regarding FDA approvals? Do you have any advice for design teams looking at starting to do a medical device around this technology?

Botos: Go with a team that has been doing that for a while because there are a few hoops you have to jump through that can be costly if you don’t know how to approach them.

Johnson: Give me an example.

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