NeTS: SmartFood: Wirelessly Networked Food for Digestive Health Monitoring

Monitoring digestive health is a vital component of overall well-being. Traditional methods for digestive health monitoring often require frequent clinical visits, invasive procedures, or the ingestion of large, uncomfortable pills. This project introduces SmartFood, a system that monitors digestive health by augmenting everyday digestible food with wireless networking capabilities. SmartFood is designed to lower the barriers to digestive health monitoring, making it as effortless as consuming regular food, with data collected wirelessly in a home setting. As SmartFood devices traverse the body, they detect various impairments affecting the esophagus, stomach, and intestines, wirelessly transmitting the data to an external reader. The project specifically focuses on monitoring inflammation, acidity, and bloating, three common conditions impacting the digestive system. In doing so, SmartFood will explore new avenues for clinical solutions and broader STEM education surrounding health sensing. SmartFood also has broader implications towards ensuring greater accessibility to digestive health monitoring through at-home sensing. SmartFood’s core technology involves developing battery-free backscatter wireless networking and hybrid chemical-wireless sensing frameworks integrated into completely edible and digestible everyday foodstuffs. These systems are designed to be tiny, physically flexible, and safely processed by the gastrointestinal tract. This enables users to safely consume SmartFood-embedded items and retrieve health data via an external wireless receiver during the digestion process. SmartFood investigates multiple elements of this paradigm, including battery-free communication, integrated sensing systems, and end-to-end evaluation across various digestive sensing tasks. This research has direct implications for overall health and well-being, building on fundamental insights across wireless networks, embedded systems, materials science, and digital health. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.