PressureCap: An endoscopic sensor capsule for real-time gastrointestinal pressure monitoring

Functional gastrointestinal (GI) disease associated with abnormal GI motility has an adverse impact on the quality of life of those affected. High-resolution manometry has improved the diagnosis of these conditions, enabling motility measurement, but these tools are limited in that they cannot access the entire length of the GI tract. Other solutions, such as the SmartPill ingestible motility capsule, only measure the transit times between the regions of the GI tract and provide information on the luminal component of GI pressure. Measuring both luminal and contractile pressure caused by peristalsis would improve the diagnosis of abnormal motility. Here, we report an ingestible capsule encapsulated with a flexible pressure sensor array. The capsule can detect changes in both contractile and luminal GI pressure in an in vitro peristaltic tissue phantom and in porcine animal models. These findings promise high-resolution, sensitive, multisite pressure measurements currently not possible with other ingestible motility capsules.