1 Computer Guts and Swallowed Sensors: Ingestibles Made Palatable in an Era of Embodied Computing

Picture the following three scenarios. You have an elderly uncle named Buck. Given his advanced age, on rare occasions, Uncle Buck forgets to take his prescribed dosages of phenytoin and azathioprine, both lifesaving medications. Stephanie, your best friend's niece, has spent the last two weeks in pain and requires risky surgery to dislodge a foreign object that has become stuck somewhere in her gastrointestinal tract. Once a week, you worry about an increased heartrate, shortness of breath, and begin to wonder whether you should slow down your run. A company, Visceral Data, begins producing smart pills to assist in each of the above three cases. Currently, numerous partners and organizations in academia, government, and the private sector are in fact building ingestible computational technologies that would feature prominently in each of the above scenarios, including the policy frameworks that govern them.1 As former Alphabet executive chair Eric Schmidt once stated, “You will—voluntarily, I might add—take a pill, which you think of as a pill but is in fact a microscopic robot, which will monitor your systems” and share information about what is happening in your body (Bilton 2013).