Reaping the benefits of AI innovations – from ingestible capsules to home monitoring
Artificial intelligence (AI) tools are helping with diagnosis and treatment of health problems in a variety of innovative ways.
Developed by Yasser Khan, an assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of Southern California (USC), the capsules can detect gasses associated with gastritis and gastric cancers. Khan’s team have created a wearable coil that generates a magnetic field on a t-shirt. This field, coupled with a trained neural network, allows them to locate the capsule within the body.
The capsules are equipped, not just with electronics for tracking location, but with an optical sensing membrane that is selective to gasses. This membrane is made up of materials whose electrons change their behaviour within the presence of ammonia gas. Ammonia is a component of H pylori, the gut bacteria that could be a sign of peptic ulcer, gastric cancer, or irritable bowel syndrome.
The device is still in relatively early stages of development, however. The next step is to test the wearables on swine models. Khan believes that as well as using it to detect gastric illnesses, it has potential to monitor brain health.