These Tiny Sensors Attach Directly to Your Teeth and Monitor What You Eat

Diet is important to most people—ABC News reports a annual revenue of $20 billion just for the US weight-loss industry. But, actually monitoring what you eat, which is arguably the most important part of maintaining a healthy diet, is quite difficult. For most people, it comes down to logging what you eat by guessing exact portion sizes and hoping you can find accurate nutrition information on the food itself. It’s a lot of work and has a huge margin of error, but a new development from the Tufts University School of Engineering may soon change that.

The team of researchers will be publishing their findings in Advanced Materials soon, and it looks promising. They were able to create a tiny 2x2mm flexible sensor that mounts directly onto your tooth. As you eat or drink, the sensor wirelessly transmits information about the nutritional content to a receiver where it can be analyzed and logged.

That’s possible because the sensor uses a variation of RFID (radio-frequency identification) communication that lets it send data wirelessly without needing its own power source. Like traditional RFID devices, a radio signal is picked up by the antenna and powers the circuit. That signal is then modified and sent back, carrying data with it.

In this case, the signal is modified based on the effect certain substances have on a bioresponsive layer in the sensor. The sensor is still in its infancy, and can only detect salt, glucose, and alcohol. But, the potential is there to monitor far more, and demand for a simple, passive sensor like this could certainly push that research forward.