FDA Approves New Digital Sensor To Ensure ‘Patients With Mental Health Issues’ Take Their Meds

The Food and Drug Administration has just approved a new pill with a digital sensor in it. It will “ensure” that patients who suffer from mental health issues take their medicine when they are told. But privacy concerns have not gone unnoticed.

Regulators in the United States have approved the first bill that can be digitally tracked as it makes its way through the human body.  The Abilify MyCite aripiprazole tablets used for treating schizophrenia and manic episodes have an ingestible sensor embedded inside them that records that the medication has been taken. A patch worn by the patient transmits this information to their smartphone.

But many are raising the red flag that this could simply be another form of medical “big brother.” You may no longer have the right to refuse medications in the very near future.

The Abilify MyCite features a sensor the size of a grain of sand made of silicon, copper, and magnesium. An electrical signal is activated when the sensor comes into contact with stomach acid — the sensor then passes through the body naturally. A patch the patient wears on their left rib cage receives the signal several minutes after the pill is ingested. The patch then sends data like the time the pill was taken and the dosage to a smartphone app over Bluetooth. The patch also records activity levels, sleeping patterns, steps taken, activity, and heart rate, and must be replaced every seven days. The patient’s doctor and up to four other people chosen by the patient, including family members, can access the information. The patient can revoke access at any time. – The Verge

Is it really hard to understand why people are raising concerns about privacy over this new pill? The pill is one way to address the prevalent problem of patients not taking their medication correctly. According to the IMS Institute’s estimates, the improper and unnecessary use of medicine cost the US healthcare sector over $200 billion in 2012.

But, the approval also opens the door for pills that are used for other conditions beyond mental health to be digitized and monitored, and could eventually lead to tracking devices for humans being slipped into medication. What is the government’s obsession with keeping the people doped up? Complacency, perhaps?

Others are worried that tracking pills will be a step towards punishing patients who don’t comply with either medical or government demands to take drugs. Ameet Sarpatwari, an instructor in medicine at Harvard Medical School told The New York Times the digital pill “has the potential to improve public health. [But] if used improperly, it could foster more mistrust instead of trust.”

Bill Gates’ New Population Control Microchip Due for Launch in 2018

Bill Gates is due to launch his new population control microchip in 2018
[image: Neon Nettle]

By: Jay Greenberg, Neon Nettle | 

Multi-billionaire Bill Gates has developed a new microchip, along with researchers at MIT, that will allow for adjustments to be made to a person’s hormone levels via remote control, in a bid to reduce the planet’s population.

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has been working in conjunction with a small Massachusetts startup to develop the “digital pill” that will enable women’s fertility to be switched on or off, remotely, with the touch of a button.

The new “digital version of the contraceptive” pill will be tested in Africa this year where the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has spent years developing vaccination and family planning programs.

Following testing, the microchips are due to be rolled out globally in 2018 with “every woman in America” replacing their regular contraceptive pill with the new remote-controlled chips, according to Gates.

According to the Guardian, the chip is implanted under the skin and releases small doses of the contraceptive hormone levonorgestrel on a daily basis, with enough capacity to last 16 years.

About the same size as a Scrabble tile, it houses a series of micro-reservoirs covered by an ultra-thin titanium and platinum seal.The hormone is released by passing a small electric current from an internal battery through the seal, which melts it temporarily, allowing a 30 microgram dose of levonorgestrel to seep out each day. And it can be simply switched off by a wireless remote, avoiding the clinical procedures needed to deactivate other contraceptive implants.

“The ability to turn the device on and off provides a certain convenience factor for those who are planning their family,” says MIT’s Dr. Robert Farra, adding that “the idea of using a thin membrane like an electric fuse was the most challenging and the most creative problem we had to solve.”

But just as hackers can spoof wifi remotes to operate neighbors’ garage doors and flip their TV channels, could a remote-controlled contraceptive open the floodgates for a new form of ovarian hacking?“Someone across the room cannot reprogramme your implant,” says Farra.

“Communication with the implant has to occur at skin contact-level distance. Then we have secure encryption. That prevents someone from trying to interpret or intervene between the communications.”

The idea for micro-dispensing chips was first developed in the 1990s by Professor Robert Langer at MIT, the founder of innumerable biotech companies and holder of more than 800 patents, known in the industry as “the most cited engineer in history”. His lab caught the attention of Bill Gates in 2012, during his search for a revolution in birth control (which has already spawned plans for a graphene condom), and Langer subsequently leased the technology to Microchips, a company already working on a micro-dosing implant for osteoporosis.

Langer says that the implant will be available by 2018, once the coming trials are complete, and that the device will be “competitively priced” in a bid to ensure it replaces conventional contraception.

Bill Gates recently caused controversy after he spoke out about the immigration crisis in Europe saying that the continent will be “devastated by African refugees” unless severe and immediate action is taken to reduce the population in Africa.

This has left many questioning Gates’ motives behind his vaccination programs after the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation had previously been accused of secretly sterilizing millions of women in Africa by doctors in Kenya after abortion drugs were discovered in Tetanus vaccines.

The program, which is funded by Bill Gates, has been accused of conducting a mass depopulation experiment on the people of Kenya without their consent.

Read more at: http://www.neonnettle.com/features/1046-bill-gates-new-population-control-microchip-due-for-launch-in-2018
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