By Samantha Donovan
Working out what is upsetting your stomach could soon be as simple as swallowing a capsule and checking your mobile phone.
Melbourne researchers have developed a high-tech capsule that can monitor the gases in a person’s gut and send the data to a device outside the body.
The researchers at RMIT University estimate nearly half of all Australians will complain of stomach ailments in any one year.
They said those problems were often caused by intestinal gases and had been linked to colon cancer, irritable bowel syndrome and inflammatory bowel disease.
Professor Kourosh Kalantar-zadeh said several gases produced in the digestive system could affect health.
“For example, some of the gasses are acidic, like hydrogen disulfide – the smelly gas which is produced by rotten eggs – [and] methane, which is considered a greenhouse gas, but it’s also an acidic gas,” he said.
“You imagine an excessive production of those gases can produce an environment inside the gut that can start a kind of state of irritation for the bowel.”
With the help of colleagues from Monash and Melbourne Universities and the CSIRO, Professor Kalantar-zadeh developed a capsule that reads the gas levels in a person’s gut before passing out of the body.
Capsule could be monitored with phone app
The capsule was made of a plastic that was safe to consume and contained a membrane that absorbed the gases, a battery, and a sensor that produced a signal and then transmitted it to a receiver outside the body, which could even be a mobile phone.
“We have a microcontroller, like a computer, inside the capsule,” he said.
“It’s a tiny, tiny, tiny computer. It reads the data, changes it from an analogue to a digital signal, it codes it and sends it to a transmitter.
“At the point that [people] feel uncomfortable, generally there is a high chance there is an extra gas, or a specific gas, produced at higher concentrations, and at that point they can see [it] on the monitor.”
Similar capsules are already used to monitor the methane production of sheep and cows.
Professor Kalantar-zadeh’s capsules were being trialled on pigs and he hoped human trials would begin soon.
He said they could be used for the diagnosis and treatment of gut conditions.
But he was particularly keen for people to use the capsules to monitor their own health and work out which foods irritated their digestive system.
“[We’re] hoping such a tool helps people to at least go direct to the problem and see what’s happening to the body, rather than just guessing, taking random probiotics, or changing the diet or anything like that,” Professor Kalantar-zadeh said.
The research has been published in the journal Trends in Biotechnology.