Department of Electronic Engineering, Sir Syed University of Engineering & Technology, Karachi, Pakistan.
Department of Mechanical and Electrical Engineering, Massey University, Palmerston North, New Zealand.
Gut. 2023 Dec 7;73(1):186-202. doi: 10.1136/gutjnl-2023-329614.
Smart capsules are developing at a tremendous pace with a promise to become effective clinical tools for the diagnosis and monitoring of gut health. This field emerged in the early 2000s with a successful translation of an endoscopic capsule from laboratory prototype to a commercially viable clinical device. Recently, this field has accelerated and expanded into various domains beyond imaging, including the measurement of gut physiological parameters such as temperature, pH, pressure and gas sensing, and the development of sampling devices for better insight into gut health. In this review, the status of smart capsules for sensing gut parameters is presented to provide a broad picture of these state-of-the-art devices while focusing on the technical and clinical challenges the devices need to overcome to realise their value in clinical settings. Smart capsules are developed to perform sensing operations throughout the length of the gut to better understand the body's response under various conditions. Furthermore, the prospects of such sensing devices are discussed that might help readers, especially health practitioners, to adapt to this inevitable transformation in healthcare. As a compliment to gut sensing smart capsules, significant amount of effort has been put into the development of robotic capsules to collect tissue biopsy and gut microbiota samples to perform in-depth analysis after capsule retrieval which will be a game changer for gut health diagnosis, and this advancement is also covered in this review. The expansion of smart capsules to robotic capsules for gut microbiota collection has opened new avenues for research with a great promise to revolutionise human health diagnosis, monitoring and intervention.
智能胶囊正在飞速发展，有望成为诊断和监测肠道健康的有效临床工具。这一领域始于 21 世纪初，内窥镜胶囊从实验室原型成功转化为商业可行的临床设备。最近，该领域加速发展，并扩展到成像以外的各个领域，包括测量肠道生理参数（如温度、pH 值、压力和气体感应），以及开发采样设备以更深入地了解肠道健康。在这篇综述中，介绍了用于感测肠道参数的智能胶囊的现状，提供了这些最先进设备的广泛概述，同时重点介绍了设备在临床环境中实现其价值所需克服的技术和临床挑战。智能胶囊的开发是为了在肠道的整个长度上进行感测操作，以更好地了解身体在各种条件下的反应。此外，还讨论了这些感测设备的前景，这可能有助于读者，特别是医疗保健从业者，适应医疗保健领域不可避免的这一转变。作为对肠道感测智能胶囊的补充，人们投入了大量精力开发机器人胶囊来收集组织活检和肠道微生物群样本，以便在胶囊回收后进行深入分析，这将改变肠道健康诊断的游戏规则，这一进展也在本综述中涵盖。智能胶囊向用于肠道微生物群收集的机器人胶囊的扩展为研究开辟了新途径，有望彻底改变人类健康诊断、监测和干预。
