NFCapsule: An Ingestible Sensor Pill for Eosinophilic Esophagitis Detection Based on Near-field Coupling

This paper presents NFCapsule, a light-weight, battery-free, and ingestible biomedical sensor that can potentially enable non-invasive detection of active eosinophilic esophagitis (EoE). EoE is an allergen-induced inflammatory condition of the esophagus; its diagnosis generally involves invasive, wired, and time-consuming endoscopy. In contrast, NFCapsule aims to wirelessly detect active EoE by tracking tissue impedance through an ingestible pill that the patient swallows. Specifically, recent biomedical research has shown that active EoE induces observable changes in the electrochemical impedance of the esophagus tissue due to an increase in its intercellular spacing. We design the NFCapsule pill based on RLC resonant circuits and model the target tissue as an impedance component that changes the resonant properties of the pill circuit. Further, the NFCapsule reader identifies the resonant properties of the pill by consistently monitoring the amount of energy transferred to the pill as it goes through the esophagus, and converts this information to estimates of bio-impedance. We implement NFCapsule pill prototypes with flexible polyimide PCBs and gelatin capsules (27 mm in height and 10 mm in diameter) and evaluated NFCapsule with both ionic agarose hydrogel models and ex vivo porcine esophageal tissues (no human patients involved). We show that NFCapsule maintains high classification accuracy under various practical scenarios (e.g., blockage, bending, movement, etc.) and achieves 85% average accuracy between healthy and unhealthy tissue samples.