How Technology Can Improve Gut Health

Gut

 

‘You really are what you eat’ is a renowned adage that also describes the thought that food affects an individual’s health. Apart from genetic predisposition, dietary options are a significant contributor to obesity both gastrointestinal (GI) disorders and metabolic syndrome (MS), also an illness of adrenal inflammation associated with chronic ailments like hypertension, cardiovascular troubles, and type two diabetes. Thus our consumption habits and nutrient options are vital for keeping healthy and critical to patients with metabolic illnesses.

The domain names name of GI ailments and MS is huge and complicated. Though GI ailments (like inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) and Crohn’s disease) affect over 20 percent of the international population, their development isn’t always fully known. Additionally, complaints are frequently quite generic and hard to differentiate. To catch disease progression, there’s an increasing requirement for biomarkers from the gut. Biomarkers are objective, quantifiable signs of a disorder or biological procedure. You will find biomarkers recognized for measuring feces, saliva, and blood, but right quantifying them at the gut is fresh and would offer local information. Early detection and customized nutritional supplements can decrease incidence, morbidity, and health expenditures, and enhance people’s wellbeing, but we want the proper tools. Chris Van Hoof, vice-president in imec, clarifies the technological innovations which will bring about improved bowel health and finally to a much healthier life.

A pill for stomach health

The most effective approach to acquire data from the GI tract would be to follow exactly the exact identical route as your meals. Present camera alternatives like endoscopy can’t show functional disorders like irritable bowel syndrome (IBS) and motility syndromes, that need chemical biomarkers. Similarly, an individual’s individual microbiome remains largely unexplored land. The microbiome includes trillions of bacteria that reside in the gut and affect digestion and health. Its makeup differs for everybody, and that which we eat also impacts the microbiome in various ways. Even food with comparable nutrient values may improve or reduce specific bacterial strains from the gut, based on who is consuming it.

Imec is growing ingestible technologies to quantify mechanical, electrical, and chemical processes in the gut as a response to such challenges. Ingestible are little detectors that you consume which come in 2 flavors: sampling or sensing. The choice is dependent upon the program.

Ingestible intention to quantify gut parameters.

Sensing ingestible goal to collect information as they journey across the digestive tract and also send this info to a recipient beyond the body. They are used preventively and also to get disorder interception, by way of instance, by discovering and monitoring markers linked to metabolic health and related issues. They might also offer details regarding nutrition, digestive procedures, and an individual’s metabolism by tracking levels of particular analytes like short-chain fatty acids (SCFA) or nutritional minerals (e.g., sodium, potassium, and potassium). The objective is not connected directly to disease discovery, yet to catch flashes (so-called dysbiosis if it’s regarding the microbiome) or nutrient shortages which in the future could cause chronic disease.

Some metabolites need big, specialized gear for evaluation just like a chromatography installation. These tools aren’t easily miniaturized, nor is there a demand for miniaturizing because it normally involves single dimensions or places checks. In these scenarios, sampling tablets can offer an option, taking samples, and quantifying markers in the desired position. They might also be utilized to acquire different measuring factors from various locations. These sampling tablets have to be collected for laboratory analysis, by way of instance, to examine the microbiome-specific article.

Bright pills packaged with intelligent technology

Creating smart pills for both sampling and sensing in the gut is tough. To begin with, the ingestible should be quite little in the comfort and security perspective. The suggested variety of sensing changes in the gut in this form variable hasn’t yet been attained. In addition, the gut and particularly the gut are a brutal environment that may impact any sensor since it travels throughout the GI tract. What’s more, localizing the detector in this intricate organ isn’t insignificant – because people have a ‘map’ of an individual’s GI tract nor even a ‘GPS’. Ultimately, regaining it (if necessary) still needs an elegant option.

The intelligent tablets are still small but packed with technologies.

Imec is constructing the components for all those ingestible. On the detector level, researchers wish to have the ability to examine mechanical motions of the GI tract, as well as electric stimuli that regulate muscle contractions and compound procedures (involving enzymes and hormones) that divide food. Therefore, multimodal detectors blending electro-chemical, and wave-based feeling are required. What’s more, the physical limitations set a squeeze battery capability, particularly for multi-sensor apparatus and sampling tablets where the majority of the volume is dedicated to this performance. That’s the reason why ultra-low-power miniature vents are critical for this particular program. Also, the data may be (partially) processed with algorithms and signal processing electronics from the apparatus itself to decrease the quantity of raw information that needs to be sent wirelessly into a wearable or other mobile device. For wireless communication, ultra-low-power radio transceivers are especially targeting emerging power-limited along with volume-constrained programs, like ingestible.

Now, imec has designed multiple building blocks and incorporated them into capsule-size. The apparatus has a +6 daily battery life when forming and transmitting information every three sec wirelessly.

 

ALSO READ: Technology Advancing Us To the Future

 

Find and recover

The consequent pill calls for a protective covering to endure e.g. stomach acids also arrive and function in the area of interest. An additional problem is that cover should be ‘published’ in the goal place in the gut so the ingestible may do its sampling or sensing purpose. In the long run, once the ingestible renders the human body, the sampling tablets have to be gathered to acquire the samples for evaluation. Although collecting isn’t only necessary for sensing tablets because they’ve sent their information, recycling for environmental and safety reasons could possibly be chosen or desired.

In the end, a significant challenge in creating ingestible is finding the pill because it makes its way through the digestive tract. The GI tract has been a lengthy and elaborate tube with guts that are intricately folded and flexed, different from 1 individual to another. For many programs, positioning is an essential performance as it assists in a treatment plan. By way of instance, in Crohn’s disease, it helps to find the redness but also to assess the area of it. Among the approaches to attain localization from the gut involves pH dimensions, because there are important pH changes from the GI tract in the colon. More fine-grained localization methods are under analysis.

Localization of this ingestible is vital for discovering where inflammation is located.

Imec and its own OnePlanet R&D spouse Wageningen University & Research are now testing a prototype apparatus in a synthetic gut system that simulates the gastrointestinal environment. The target of the evaluations within this in-vitro model would be to evaluate the sensitivity of this detector in an unpleasant environment, to assess the stability of the detector as time passes, to estimate its own specificity, and also to assess safety attributes.

The toilet for wellness

Ingestible are ideally suited to short-term, even real-time, dimensions that assist with an investigation or an appraisal to get an intervention. Imec and its own OnePlanet research spouses also picture simple tools which empower long-term, regular monitoring for long-term avoidance. They didn’t pick wearable technology since the user has the duty to use it because it poses a barrier for certain men and women. On the flip side, everybody uses the bathroom.

The ‘smart bathroom’ is a part of an endeavor to come up with a ‘toilet for wellbeing’ with built-in detector technologies. It’s a research system to quantify health parameters at the comfort of your home. The vision is the toilet, a location you stop by daily, performs everyday check-ups. Dimensions can be carried out via a wise toilet or other bathroom fittings, while private feedback can be supplied on the area, according to instantaneous measurements or expanding tendencies with time.

In the very first edition, the wise bathroom incorporates sensors to quantify cardiovascular function like ECG (electrocardiogram) and PPG (photopletysmography). Within another generation, engineering for urine and feces analysis is going to be inserted to research markers for constipation or dehydration.

A new smart bathroom

In parallel using a scalable ‘regular toilet’ imec can be working in an ‘ultimate bathroom’, an evaluation vehicle with top-of-the-bill analytical gear. It’s geared toward more in-depth dimensions and goals to research a bathroom’s constraints as a car for nutritional and metabolic research.

At precisely exactly the exact identical time, the bathroom pushes technological improvements ahead by decoding specifications. These golden regular dimensions enable us to ascertain the minimum viable specs the detector technologies need to attain. This sort of benchmarking optimizes the possibilities for the technology development of these detectors.

Food for thought

Possessing an ingestible sensor and a wise bathroom doesn’t indicate that the job is complete. The extra value of the detector engineering is located in led insights, styles, and versions that you can build dependent on the information which are created by the detectors. Ingestible are study vehicles that empower large-scale, longitudinal research at the people level, which can be sought after in clinical, pharmaceutical, and nutritional research. The wise bathroom acts as a study instrument in OnePlanet’s analysis actions, allowing researchers to occasionally follow people’s metabolic wellbeing and nutrition-related disorders at home.

OnePlanet Research Center is now planning a comprehensive study about eating and food customs, including imec’s ingestible and intelligent toilet sensing technology. OnePlanet is an innovation center for health, food, and agricultural engineering, and it comes with cooperation between imec along with also the Dutch universities Radboud University, Wageningen University and Research (WUR), along with the instructional hospital Radboudumc. The outcomes of the analysis are going to be an anchoring point to offer comments to improve gut health and, finally, to excite behavioral alterations.

That is a large challenge. As sporting, a Fitbit does not make you fit, acquiring a wise bathroom won’t automatically cause you to alter your own eating habits. Along with researchers and nutrition specialists, OnePlanet investigates ways to supply personalized guidance to individuals. Everybody knows that healthful food means ingesting fibers and drinking sufficient water. On the other hand, the negative effects of a lousy diet could be private. Individual dimensions make it a lot less difficult to offer individual feedback which will stay better than normal information.

Your personal electronic twin

The detector information from ingestible and bright toilets, together with the ideal contextual information (e.g. what exactly are subjected doing at a particular time?) But also psychological health, sleeping routine, or anxiety levels, supply a rich dataset in which present and future health conditions for a person could be derived. Even the ‘digital twin’ of somebody can forecast the private effects of lifestyle and dietary modifications or can assist with the early detection of disorders. The twin not merely helps the consumer to obtain comments on his wellbeing but also assists the expert care providers in assisting devise personalized information.

Your electronic twin empowers truly personalized lifestyle and dietary advice.

As it’s still a struggle to double a whole human, investigators split the body into organs or systems. Assembling a more precise twin demands population-wide longitudinal measurement information on physiology, behavior, microbiome, and genomics. From this contrast between individuals, people, and subgroups that say similar behaviors or structure can subsequently be typified. However, getting from information to wisdom needs a significant effort, by way of instance, by constructing unsupervised and automated processing pipelines that aim at sensitive information and eliminate artifacts. Imec has made a beginning on this electronic platform.

Tools like the ingestible and intelligent toilet are crucial in creating the double, due to the personalized ramifications of gut and nutrition health on your own overall wellness. The twin is likely to produce the future of nourishment truly personalized.

 

Technology Advancing Us To the Future

Every person is faced with the need to use modern technologies almost every day. Without them, human life is no longer possible, the Internet, online television , Internet radio exist even in the most remote corners of the planet. Technology is changing our lives. Progress irresistibly pushes humanity forward to a bright and comfortable future. Let’s look back in the recent past to understand how the world has changed.

Communication has changed in literally some hundred years.

Now you can send a letter, message or call anywhere in the world. The speed of information dissemination has sharply decreased, the quality has improved, and the cost of all types of communication is decreasing every year.

The Internet The same connection, or rather the Internet, has become a life-saving outlet for the disabled.

Unfortunately, current technologies do not yet allow to cure many non-fatal, but cruel, diseases. For various reasons, diseases do not allow many people with disabilities not only to go outside, but also to simply communicate with other people. The Internet, on the other hand, gives them the opportunity to stay connected to life, taking advantage of the possibilities of e-mail, social networks, blogs, chats and forums and hiring services for root aphids weed.

Our lives have changed thanks to mobile communications and the mobile Internet.

Various PDAs, smartphones, laptops allow a person to work anywhere and anytime. Now, if a person is not directly connected with production activities, he may not come to a stuffy and cramped office, sit in a chair for his eight-hour working day, because most of the work that needs to be done on a computer can be done at home, lying on the couch.

Changed life and electronic money systems

As well as using your bank account over the phone or over the Internet. Of course, it comes out more expensive than standing in line at the ATM, and then in the store, but, you see, in our time the opportunity to buy groceries or pay utility bills without leaving your home is worth it.

Technology has improved the survival rate of humans as a species.

If many drugs were discovered and invented long ago, then it was modern technologies that made it possible today to perform complex operations on the heart and brain, made it possible for some people to survive using artificial valves in the heart or artificial kidneys. In addition, in the present there are many opportunities (albeit far from cheap), to rejuvenate and restore health.

Technologies are constantly changing our life, making it easier, better, more interesting, bringing closer the already near future, a future without hunger, without disease, without death. Technology is changing for the better, tech like flying cars, hover boards, futuristic robots, these may be a dream for now… but who knows what technology will bring in the future.

Tv of the Future

Instead of 4K, now 8K

The 4K TVs were just about to establish themselves and replace the standard as full HD. At the CES 2020 in Las Vegas, which took place from January 7th to 10th 2020, TV manufacturers such as Samsung, LG and Sony already presented predominantly new 8K models. A technology that resolves images in 7,680 x 4,320 pixels, which is 16 times the number of pixels than Full HD could playback.

But that’s not all – the TVs will become even smarter in 2020. Integrated voice assistants such as Alexa or Google Assistant are already part of the basic equipment.

In addition, features that make the TV experience even more authentic have matured. The intelligent adjustment of the screen brightness or TV volume has been further developed.

Televisions of the future

In keeping with the increasing smartphone trends of recent years, the latest TVs are also developing: extremely thin and almost frameless. Samsung’s new “QLED flagship” is just 15 millimeters thick and has a screen area of as much as 99 percent of the TV. Samsung is talking about an “infinity screen”.

LG launched the first 48 inches (122cm) OLED TVs, making them the first 4K OLED TVs of this size. With the CX series, LG is thus confronting the trend of ever-expanding TVs.

The presentation of the new TV at the booth in combination with the G-Sync feature already presents a prime example for users. Gamers will therefore have a bright pleasure in the device thanks to new features and the small size.

But this TV is not just for gamers, it is out for everyone to enjoy including the lawyers at the Michigan Lemon Law. The new TV set in their office boosts the mood. Indeed, technology helps these lawyers provide better legal counsel.

Do you actually need an 8K TV?

According to CES, 8K TVs are the future, but the question remains open for whom a TV with such a high resolution makes sense at all. This question arises from the fact that the high prices, which are clearly above average beyond EUR 3,000, and for many above the budget, are set for television. In addition, such a large TV with oversized screens takes up a lot of space that you don’t always have in an apartment. Statistics from 2019 also prove this thesis: On average, customers spent only 1,226 euros on a new, large-format 4K model. With 6,500 euros on average, the 8K TVs are about five times as expensive.

So far, therefore, the demand for 8K TVs has been negligible. As a result, there has been only a low availability of high-resolution Televisions. However, this low supply could also be partly to blame for the lack of demand.

Thanks to upscaling technology, the new TVs can already generate 8K images, but there is hardly any “real” 8K content yet. However, 4K content has increased significantly in recent years. Well-known streaming providers such as Netflix already offer about 200 series and movies in 4K resolution. Amazon Prime is also trying to jump on this boat with a total of over 250 titles that can be streamed in 4K.

In conclusion, 8K Televisions and ever-higher resolution are an evolving trend that the major TV manufacturers cannot, of course, take away.