The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has approved a "digital pill" that contains a sensor intended to track whether a patient has taken their medicine:
For the first time, the Food and Drug Administration has approved a digital pill — a medication embedded with a sensor that can tell doctors whether, and when, patients take their medicine. The approval, announced late on Monday, marks a significant advance in the growing field of digital devices designed to monitor medicine-taking and to address the expensive, longstanding problem that millions of patients do not take drugs as prescribed.
Experts estimate that so-called non-adherence or noncompliance to medication costs about $100 billion a year, much of it because patients get sicker and need additional treatment or hospitalization. "When patients don't adhere to lifestyle or medications that are prescribed for them, there are really substantive consequences that are bad for the patient and very costly," said Dr. William Shrank, chief medical officer of the health plan division at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center.
Ameet Sarpatwari, an instructor in medicine at Harvard Medical School, said the digital pill "has the potential to improve public health," especially for patients who want to take their medication but forget. But, he added, "if used improperly, it could foster more mistrust instead of trust."
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 15 2017, @10:05PM (1 child)
just inhale as much air as possible, block the breath, push your abdominals as you wanted to exhale (but you block the air at the throat level) and wait for the next hiccup, which will be more like a burp. Keep the air a little more, when it becomes uncomfortable exhale and breath normally. I never had hiccups ever after.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 16 2017, @12:45AM
This approach suffers from too many ways to "do it wrong". Did I really inhale "as much as possible", I have no idea what it means to "push [my] abdominals as you wanted to exhale", and how are you "block[ing] air at the throat? Etc.