Feasibility Study of Printed Capsule Antennas for Medication Compliance Monitoring

This paper presents a feasibility study of printed capsule antennas for medication compliance monitoring. During clinical trials, it is important to know with certainty a patient\´s compliance to a medication regimen, because without it, the results cannot be interpreted accurately. Small antennas printed directly onto the surface of standard capsule can potentially serve as a cost-effective method of validating medication compliance via electronic detection of a swallowed pill in the digestive tract. In this paper, we investigate various aspects of these "electronics pills," including printing methods, conductive inks and radiation characteristics of electrically small antennas inside the human body. We employ realistic antenna models and electromagnetic simulations based on the finite difference time domain method to determine the radiated field intensities for sources in the body. Phantoms solutions with electrical properties that are approximately equivalent to biological tissue are used to experimentally validate simulated results and characterize signal attenuation of electrically small radiation sources in the human torso.