Giovanni Traverso, MD, PhD

Continuous monitoring of internal body temperature provides valuable clinical insights—helping detect infection or inflammation, track physiological changes during surgery and identify postoperative complications—but it also has non-clinical applications, such as occupational health and sports medicine.

While ingestible temperature sensors offer a less invasive alternative to traditional monitoring methods, many existing devices are too large for comfortable use, particularly for pediatric and sensitive patients, and often require substantial power to operate.

To address this, researchers at Mass General Brigham, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard engineered a miniaturized ingestible temperature sensor (MITS), a blueberry-shaped wireless temperature sensor designed for continuous internal monitoring with minimal power consumption.

Led by Saransh Sharma, PhD, under the supervision of Anantha P. Chandrakasan, PhD, and Giovanni Traverso, MD, PhD, the team tested the device in preclinical models across several clinically relevant scenarios.

They found that across a variety of use cases—including multi-day gastrointestinal monitoring, detecting temperature changes associated with anesthesia and tissue ischemia, and integrating into medical catheters—the ingestible temperature sensor reliably measured core body temperature within 0.1°C error compared with standard probes.

By enabling precise, wire-free temperature monitoring from within the body, MITS could expand options for perioperative and critical care monitoring and provide an alternative when conventional temperature-monitoring tools are invasive or difficult to deploy.

Published in Nature Electronics on June 15, 2026| Read the paper: “A miniaturized ingestible temperature sensor for continuous interval monitoring”
Summary reviewed by: Gio Traverso, MD, PhD, co-senior author