Getting tired of the global movement to spy on everyone, everywhere? Too bad – because it looks like your prescription pills are the next consumer item that will be modified to transmit data (spy) on you.
The Reutersstory says the company behind the “smart pill” Novartis AG plans on seeking regulatory approval soon for their microchip embedded pills. The pioneer program will utilize one of the Swiss company’s drugs taken by organ transplant patients.
Novartis AG’s global head of development Trevor Mundel thinks many other pills could have little chips in them too.
“We are taking forward this transplant drug with a chip and we hope within the next 18 months to have something that we will be able to submit to the regulators, at least in Europe,” Mundel told the Reuters Health Summit in New York. “I see the promise as going much beyond that,” he added.
Novartis spent a lot of cash to win the rights to access to the chip-in-a-pill technology, $24 million dollars. The ingestible chips are turned on by stomach acid and they send information to a little patch stuck on the patient’s skin, which can send data to a smartphone or over the Internet to a doctor.
The initial project with the chipped pills is designed to make sure patients take their drugs at the correct times and to make sure they take their proper dose.
Of course, they see other uses for the pill based on all of the other types of bodily information it can gather. Plenty of biometric information can be obtained from such chips.
Here we go again! I love (hate) the tired corporate mentality of overkill. If something seems good, they have to mass produce it and keep making more and more until they kill it.
Except this time a corporation isn’t trying to kill culture or a popular fad, or even a kid’s toy. This time they’re playing around with medicine.
Using chips to help monitor a transplant patient’s health is a delicate procedure and in this case the chipped pill could be useful.
But I’m already thinking about how evil it sounds to have a big pharmaceutical company transferring all kinds of biometric data about patients via wireless connection. Do you trust the same people who wouldn’t piss on you if you were on fire to not be evil?
For some reason everything has to have a chip in it now. Maybe they’ll put chips in condoms next. That would be pretty funny right?
