Plenty of ink and cyberspace have been devoted to Proteus Digital Health [4] (or Proteus Biomedical as it was known formerly). It's all warranted of course. Knowledge that patients have taken their medication and information on how the body is reacting to them is invaluable in the practice of medicine.

And that's what the company's Helius feedback system - comprsing an FDA-cleared ingestible sensor, a wearable patch and related software is capable of doing. A patient swallows a drug that is embedded with the sensor, and data about medication consumption and the patent's activity is set to a bodyworn patch, which in turn sends information wirelessy to mobile devices such as a smartphone. 

The sensor and the patch help to confirm that the patient has in fact taken the medication, thereby directly targeting the expensive problem of medication adherence in the healthcare world.

What's more the ingestible sensor, a medical device, and the digital feedback system can predict which patients will be compliant. Predictive analytics is key to successful patient compliance. 

But it's not all about doctors. Family members can also get real time data about whether their loved ones have taken their medication and how they are doing provided the patient shares that information. Currently the sensor has to be ingested along with medication for the system to work, but the goal is to have the sensor embedded within a drug.

Pharma companies and medical device companies like Medtronic and St. Jude Medical are equally interested in Proteus and have invested in the startup [5].

Here is how the technology works:

Here's a video of how the Helius digital health feedback system [6] works.