Medtronic secured an FDA clearance for the newest generation of its ingestible digital camera. It will serve as the basis for at-home remote diagnostics programs, which are in high-demand since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Shaped like a small capsule, the PillCam Smart Bowel 3 takes between two and six pictures per second as it makes its way through the digestive tract—resulting in about 50,000 images that can be parsed for the signs of Crohn’s disease or iron-deficient anemia or to locate the sources of obscure internal bleeding that can’t be reached by other endoscopic means.