This groundbreaking pill stands out from the crowd of weight loss medications saturating the market. Unlike its chemical-laden counterparts that target appetite, this innovation takes a different route. Upon contact with gastric fluid in the stomach, the pill activates vibrations, inducing a sensation of fullness.
The team at MIT has steered away from conventional methods, offering a unique solution that could potentially revolutionize the way we approach weight management. The quest for the perfect weight loss remedy may have just taken a seismic leap forward.
From Oddity Central:
VIBES, short for Vibrating Ingestible BioElectronic Stimulator, was only recently unveiled in a study published in the Science Journal, but it is already being touted by the media as the future of weight loss. Although it has yet to be tested on humans, trials on pigs have yielded very promising results. After about 30 minutes of VIBES activity, pigs consumed on average almost 40 percent less food in the next half hour than they did without the smart pill. Apparently, the revolutionary device works by activating stretch receptors in the stomach, simulating the presence of food. This in turn signals the hypothalamus to increase the levels of hormones that make us feel full.
“We envision the Vibes pill being ingested on a relatively empty stomach 20 to 30 min before anticipated meals to trigger the desired sensation of satiety early in the meal,” the team that developed VIBES wrote about the use of the smart pill.
The VIBES pill was reportedly thought up by Shriya Srinivasan, a former MIT graduate student and postdoc, currently an assistant professor of bioengineering at Harvard University. During his years at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, he became interested in the idea of controlling the connection between the brain and the stomach by artificially stretching the mechanoreceptors that line the stomach, through vibration.
