Biomedical

A Better Camera Pill

A collaboration of engineers led by the Fraunhofer Institute for Biomedical Engineering, in St. Ingbert, Germany, has developed the first-ever control ­system for a camera pill. Natural motions propel today’s camera pills through the esophagus too fast to take all the ­pictures that doctors would like to see. The Fraunhofer pill is steered using an ­external magnet held by a physician. ”In the future, doctors will be able to stop the camera in the esophagus, move it up and down, and turn it,” says Frank Volke, a researcher at Fraunhofer.

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