• Posted January 12, 2026

New Pill Can Report When You've Swallowed It

There’s a new — and somewhat creepy — way to make sure people are taking their prescription medications on schedule.

Researchers have developed a pill that can report when it’s been swallowed, by sending out a radio signal from inside the stomach.

The experimental pill could be used to monitor people for whom sticking to a drug regimen is vital — for instance, transplant patients taking immune-suppressing drugs, folks with dangerous infections like HIV or tuberculosis, or those who need treatment for extended periods, researchers said.

“The goal is to make sure that this helps people receive the therapy they need to help maximize their health,” senior researcher Dr. Giovanni Traverso, an associate professor of mechanical engineering at MIT and a gastroenterologist at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, said in a news release.

“We want to prioritize medications that, when non-adherence is present, could have a really detrimental effect for the individual,” Traverso added.

The pills contain a biodegradable radio frequency antenna, researchers said.

The zinc-cellulose antenna is rolled up and placed inside a capsule alongside the drug to be delivered, researchers explained.

“We chose these materials recognizing their very favorable safety profiles and also environmental compatibility,” Traverso said.

Once the capsule is swallowed, the coating breaks down and releases both the drug and the antenna. Working with a small radio chip, the antenna sends a signal to confirm the capsule has been swallowed.

The transmission happens within 10 minutes of a pill being swallowed, researchers said. The antenna then breaks down and is absorbed into the body.

The radio chip, which is about 400 by 400 micrometers, is not biodegradable and would have to be passed through the digestive tract, researchers said.

By comparison, a human hair is about 70 micrometers wide and a pebble of fine beach sands about 90 micrometers, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

“The components are designed to break down over days using materials with well-established safety profiles, such as zinc and cellulose, which are already widely used in medicine,” lead researcher Mehmet Girayhan Say, an MIT research scientist, said in a news release.

“Our goal is to avoid long-term accumulation while enabling reliable confirmation that a pill was taken, and longer-term safety will continue to be evaluated as the technology moves toward clinical use,” Say added.

Animal testing showed that the radio signal transmitted from inside the stomach can be picked up by an external receiver up to two feet away.

Researchers envision that human patients would wear a device that receives the signal and then transmits it to their health care team.

Other groups that could benefit from this medication monitoring would include those who’ve received a stent to reopen a clogged artery and people with mental health disorders who have an impaired ability to remember to take their meds, researchers said.

However, more work is needed to refine the system before it’s ready for use, the team added.

A report on the new pill was published Jan. 8 in the journal Nature Communications.

More information

The American Heart Association has more on the importance of medication adherence.

SOURCE: MIT, news release, Jan. 8, 2025