The camera pill is not larger than a candy. It can be swallowed by the patient. The doctor steers it through the esophagus and stomach with a magnetic device.
(Image credit: Fraunhofer Institute of Biomedical Engineering)
Candy-size cameras can provide insiders-only tours of intestines. But downing one of these “pills” has not been what the doctor ordered for obtaining more than a fleeting glimpse of the esophagus or stomach en route to the lower digestive system.
This previous generation of consumable cameras generated two to four images per second. But they could not provide many, if any, usable images of the upper digestive system – they passed through the esophagus in only three or four seconds. And given their relatively heavy five-gram mass, they would settle on the stomach bottom. So patients had to swallow an uncomfortably thick endoscope for their doctor to study the lining of their esophagus or stomach.
