Scientists race to develop microchips to monitor the body's health

Early each morning, Mary Ellen Snodgrass swallows a computer chip embedded in one of her pills and roughly the size of a grain of sand. When it hits her stomach, it transmits a signal to her tablet computer indicating that she has successfully taken her heart and thyroid medications.

"See," said Snodgrass, checking her online profile page. With a few swipes she brings up an hourly timeline of her day with images of white pills marking the times she ingested a chip. "I can see it go in. The pill just jumped on to the screen."

Snodgrass, 91 and a retired schoolteacher, has been trying out the smart pills for her son, an employee at the company that makes the technology. She is at the forefront of what many predict will be a revolution in medicine powered by miniature chips, sensors, cameras and robots with the ability to access, analyse and manipulate the body from the inside.

With the size and cost of chip technology having fallen over the past few years, dozens of companies and academic research teams are rushing to make ingestible or implantable chips that will help patients track the condition of their bodies instantly and at a level of detail never seen.

Several have been approved by the United States Food and Drug Administration (FDA), including a transponder containing a person's medical history to inject under the skin, a camera pill to search the colon for tumours, and the technology, made by Proteus Digital Health, that Snodgrass has been using.

That system is being used to ensure older people take their pills. Scientists are working on more advanced prototypes. Nano-sensors, for example, would live in the bloodstream and send messages to smartphones whenever they saw signs of an infection, an impending heart attack or another issue, essentially serving as early-warning beacons for disease.