There’s a great deal of technology being used today that can help fight addiction, and now Pharmacy Times has written about digital pills that can make sure that patients get the right dosage, and it can also help fight addiction.
According to this report, a company called EtectRx have invented a gel pill that has a wireless sensor that can go over your regular pills you have to take. A patient swallows it, the gels dissolves in your stomach, and then it sends out a radio signal. This report continues, “The patient wears a reader, about the size of an iPod, which picks up the signal and forwards it to the provider’s smartphone app via Bluetooth.”
When patients are prescribed opioids, the inventors of EtectRx would send them home with these digital pills. And as this report explains, the digital monitoring can stop what’s called the “dangerous escalation of medications,” which is especially crucial with painkillers. When a radio signal detects this, your doctors will know it.
This system can also monitor whether your medication is working or not. As pharmacist Alex Barker writes, “If the patient is experiencing more pain than expected following treatment…One participant reported that the digital pills helped him be more aware of how much oxycodone he was ingesting.”Monitoring people while taking digital pills can hopefully cut down the chances of addiction, and pill use escalates, you can hopefully get a patient to stop early.
