My Weird Project

My Weird Project: Inventors from Kodak want to use disintegrating chips to make sure you're taking your medicine.

My Weird Project: Digestible RFID
Inventors from Kodak want to use disintegrating chips to make sure you're taking your medicine.

Forget the cameras-they've got you tagged. Kodak inventors want to give a whole new meaning to "take two of these and call me in the morning." In a Jan. 11 patent application, John P. Spoonhower and Edward Covannon detailed plans to embed dissolvable radio frequency identification (RFID) tags into oral medications. The idea is that the tag would disintegrate as the medicine is absorbed into the body, letting doctors track ingestion.

For the techie tablets to work, the patient sits next to a radio receiver, which would chronicle the tag's demise. "It would be appealing to probe the living body without the effort, expense, inconvenience and risk of injury or infection involved" with surgery, invasive procedures, blood or tissue sampling, or X-ray and magnetic resonance imaging, the inventors claim in the filing. Whether or not the medical community or patients will eat it up is another question.

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