As any livestock farmer, animal feed manufacturer, poultry breeder, or feed supplier knows, there are only a limited number of ways to judge the effectiveness of animal feed or feed additives. Growth rates, feed consumption rates, animal weight all give an insight, but what is really needed is a way to know what is really happening inside the digestive system.
Up until now, the only way to know this was through surgery or through potentially harmful rigid sensors. But now a team of researchers from MiT have found a safer, more flexible solution: they have developed an electronic sensor that can, “be rolled up and swallowed”. Already the tests have proved successful in pigs, with the sensor adhering to the stomach wall or intestinal lining where it measured the rhythmic contractions of the animal’s digestive tract. The sensor can be placed in a dissolvable capsule or inserted endoscopically. The devices stayed active for two days before degrading.
The sensors are made of elastic polymers that are as flexible as human skin. This means that they can copy skin shape, stretching and contracting as the body or stomach stretches and contracts.
However, the real advantage of these flexible devices is that they are based on piezoelectric materials, which generate a current and voltage when they are mechanically deformed, so a battery is not essential. This electricity could then be used to power a range of internal sensors, although up till now the research team has only measured the amount of electricity created as a way of calculating stomach activity.
As the MiT website reports, “In tests in pigs, the sensors successfully adhered to the stomach lining after being delivered endoscopically. Through external cables, the sensors transmitted information about how much voltage the piezoelectrical sensor generated, from which the researchers could calculate how much the stomach wall was moving, as well as distinguish when food or liquid were ingested.”
The report continues by noting the relatively simple method for making the sensor. Explaining how, “[The first step] is to fabricate electronic circuits on a silicon wafer. The circuits contain two electrodes: a gold electrode placed atop a piezoelectric material called PZT, and a platinum electrode on the underside of the PZT. Once the circuit is fabricated, it can be removed from the silicon wafer and printed onto a flexible polymer called polyimide.” Adding that, “The ingestible sensor that the researchers designed for this study is 2 by 2.5 centimeters and can be rolled up and placed in a capsule that dissolves after being swallowed.”
Publishing their results in the journal, Nature – Biomedical Engineering, the team report how they have, “demonstrated the capabilities of the sensor in simulated gastric models, quantifying key behaviours in the gastrointestinal tract using computational modelling, [as well as] validating its functionality in [both] awake and ambulating [sleeping] swine.”
As one of the researchers lead authors, Canan Dagdeviren PhD, an assistant professor in MIT’s Media Lab, noted, “For the first time, we showed that a flexible, piezoelectric device can stay in the stomach up to two days without any electrical or mechanical degradation.”
“Having flexibility has the potential to impart significantly improved safety, simply because it makes it easier to transit through the gastrointestinal tract,” adds Dr Giovanni Traverso, another senior author and research affiliate at MIT’s Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research. “Having a window into what an individual is actually ingesting can be very helpful because [it can be difficult to know] how much is being consumed.”
While at present these sensors measure only mechanical stomach activity, their skin like flexibility, and the fact that they generate electricity without a battery opens the door to attaching a range of other sensors, diagnosing a variety of digestive disorders, as well as effectively measuring feed intake. Agribusiness has already been exposed to the idea of sensors in fields of crops, and sensors around the necks of cattle; now maybe the next wave of technology will see sensors fed to livestock. Perhaps only then will farmers and feed manufacturers really understand what is happening to their feed products.
Want to learn more about feed additives, animal gut health, and the feed industry? Then please take a look at the AG CHEMI GROUP blog page.
MCP – Animal Feed’s Most Effective Growth Supplement
MCP acts as an inorganic phosphate supplement and plays an important role in the animal feed industry. It provides animals with calcium and phosphorus, which helps to improve an animal's organism, metabolism, and the functioning of nervous, immune and reproductive systems thereby increasing productivity.
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Photo credit: MiT & mnn
