Not exactly super-new tech. Another company was doing this back in, oh, 2015 or so. I know because I did some work on a "data lake" project specifically for dat

Not exactly super-new tech. Another company was doing this back in, oh, 2015 or so. I know because I did some work on a "data lake" project specifically for data gathered from the "send a signal pills". The overall system used a sensor attached to a band that was worn around the abdomen, which paired with a smartphone via Bluetooth, and then sent the data upstream via IP. There was some more in-between processing, and in the end the data wound up in a Hadoop system (this is the part I worked on). IIRC, in addition to the actual pill signal, the band also gathered data like heart-rate, body temp, angle of inclination, etc. All of this was wrapped up in some messaging about "personalized medicine", etc, yadda yadda. In reality it was, as I understood it, mostly an exercise in attempting to do something called "patent extension"[1]. Since this new delivery mechanism, and associated technology, would all require FDA approval, it somehow triggered a process that let the drug manufacturer maintain their exclusivity over a drug that was about to go off-patent. Or something like that. I was a software guy, not a lawyer, but that's the way it was explained to me. Anyway, my time on the project came to an end, and I didn't really keep up with what came of it afterwards. FWIW, the company I was working for was not Pfizer, and I'm not sure how the came to get involved in this space. Edit: I originally wasn't going to name names, since I was probably NDA'd to hell on that project, but I see somebody in the Twitter thread did call out the project I worked on. It was Abilify[2]. And it looks like the whole thing did eventually get approved. I wonder if anybody is actually using that version? Some more info here[3]. [1]: https://www.whitcomblawpc.com/additional-blogs-of-interest/patent-term-extension https://www.whitcomblawpc.com/additional-blogs-of-interest/p... [2]: https://www.fda.gov/news-events/press-announcements/fda-approves-pill-sensor-digitally-tracks-if-patients-have-ingested-their-medication https://www.fda.gov/news-events/press-announcements/fda-appr... [3]: https://www.otsuka-us.com/discover/articles-1208 https://www.otsuka-us.com/discover/articles-1208