Gastrointestinal (GI) diseases are associated with significant morbidity, mortality, and great healthcare costs worldwide. Infective diarrhea and malabsorption are quite prevalent and distressing when they happen. Reports estimate every one out of ten visits to the hospital is for diarrhea and one out of fourteen for indigestion. Other common GI disorders include peptic ulcer disease (PUD), gastroesophageal reflux disease (GERD), lactose intolerance, irritable bowel syndrome (IBS), and others too numerous to mention. Symptoms associated with these diseases are nausea, vomiting, abdominal pain, constipation, diarrhea, bloating, flatulence, and changes in bowel habits.
Man In Toilet With phone
GI issues can be quite uncomfortable, sometimes embarrassing. It is important to know what to look out for when you start feeling the slightest discomfort. As a healthy individual and even for those who have been diagnosed with one GI ailment or the other, adequate monitoring is essential. This helps you to know the next action to take.
Usually, GI conditions are monitored via clinical assessments, scoring systems for assessing the severity of disease, imaging techniques, endoscopy, and other ancillary investigations. Most of the time, these methods are pretty costly and inaccessible, especially for people without insurance and people in developing countries
The potential that technology presents
Over the past decades, human life expectancy has considerably improved due to advances in technology, medical procedures, delivery of healthcare, improved awareness, and patient empowerment. The use of smartphone applications to monitor health and symptoms is gaining ground fast. Applications like Google in the near future could have the ability to acquire data from people through in-phone and wearable sensors that capture bodily functions and activities.
These days android and IOS phones are being programmed to do just more than troll people on the streets of X. They now have in-built sensors like global positioning system (GPS), gyroscope, and complementary metal-oxide semiconductor (CMOS), which can measure and assess health parameters like temperature, blood oxygen level, respiratory rate, heart rate, and blood pressure. This affords the early detection of diseases and even life-threatening conditions.
Symptoms like flatus can be monitored by listening to the number and frequency of farts. All you need to do is have your phone with you at all times. The microphones can pick up the sounds and an algorithm can analyze the frequency, rhythm, and volume of the fart and give some suggestions that can help you health-wise. Interestingly, you can also leave the sensors on and go to bed, the algorithm can monitor the amount of fat released while at sleep.
Apart from microphones, abdominal wearables like the electrogastrogram can enable the measurement of abdominal motility and electrical activities in the stomach. It can be made as a portable device that can easily be attached to the abdomen. Constipation can be monitored by sensing the intensity of straining while defecating, diarrhea by monitoring the amount and frequency of abdominal rumbles, and intestinal motility and vomiting by monitoring the intensity of retching. These sensors can be synced to already existing health apps like Google Fit.
Interestingly, ingestible sensors also known as “ingestibles” or “swallowables”, are tiny sensors that can be ingested into the GI tract. They assess pH, temperature, pressure, and intestinal contents and send the data to the phone app it is synced to. They settle in the inner wall of the GI tract and also monitor gut motility.
Privacy Concerns
The prevailing issue when it comes to digital technology is data privacy and confidentiality. There is circulating concern that other people can access sensitive information. This might deter people from accessing these services. However, apps like Google are very keen on privacy policies and secure data handling. The data acquired is for the user only, not shared with third parties and is well encrypted. Another issue is data accuracy and people actually wonder whether they can rely on the reports given. Further studies will continue to investigate the accuracy of these methods, both the applications and wearables.
References
Chong, K. P., & Woo, B. K. (2021). Emerging wearable technology applications in gastroenterology: A review of the literature. World journal of gastroenterology, 27(12), 1149–1160. https://doi.org/10.3748/wjg.v27.i12.1149
Majumder, S., & Deen, M. J. (2019). Smartphone Sensors for Health Monitoring and Diagnosis. Sensors (Basel, Switzerland), 19(9), 2164. https://doi.org/10.3390/s19092164
Wall, C., Hetherington, V. & Godfrey, A. (2023). Beyond the clinic: the rise of wearables and smartphones in decentralising healthcare. npj Digit. Med. 6, 219. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41746-023-00971-z
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