Digitising the body before the emotions

For most of my life, I treated my ignorance of medicine as a small act of rebellion. Not knowing the names of drugs, treating pre-script-ions as passing suggestions rather than daily commandments-;- this felt like a quiet defense of bodily freedom. I told myself that as long as I remained ignorant, I would not be pulled into a life governed by pills, schedules and dosages.
Now, approaching my mid‑-;-sixties, I realise that this ignorance was never heroic. But it was, at least, a private space, an inner territory that belonged only to me. A space no machine could measure, no platform could record, no system could claim.
Today, even that space is under threat.
With a pill that knows when you swallow it and sends a signal to someone, somewhere, confirming the act, the question is no longer whether I take the medication. The question is: who owns the knowledge that I took it? Who has the right to record that moment, turn it into data, and feed it into a system whose boundaries I cannot see?
The “smart pill” developed at MIT is not just a medical innovation. It is a sign of a deeper shift: the transformation of the human body from a private organism into a data interface. A capsule dissolves inside you, releasing a zinc‑-;-powered antenna that activates a wireless signal, captured by a wearable patch and transmitted to “the relevant authority.”
On the surface, this is a clever solution to an old problem: patients who do not adhere to treatment. But beneath that surface lies something far more consequential, a new chapter in the digitisation of the body, where what was once “inside the human being” becomes shared property.
This shift is not merely technological. It is ethical, political and philosophical. When the moment of swallowing a pill becomes a recorded event, what changes is not just the relationship between patient and doctor, but the relationship between a person and their own body. The body ceases to be a secret. It becomes a file, automatically updated, continuously monitored, populated with “facts” the body’s owner no longer controls.
What used to be a voluntary confession to a doctor is now an involuntary signal that requires no words.
Richard Ashcroft, professor of bioethics at St George’s, University of London, is right when he says that digital therapeutics reinforce the idea that “the patient is always at fault.” If the signal does not register, the failure is personal, not systemic. No one asks about poverty, depression, overwork, poor communication´-or-fear of side effects. Everything collapses into one question: Why did not you swallow the pill?
Technology here does not fix the healthcare system. It adds a layer of surveillance on top of it. The patient becomes a potential suspect, forever needing to prove compliance through a wireless ping.
But the deeper question goes beyond blame.
Who owns the body once it becomes data?
If the signal goes to the medical team, who ensures it won’t also go to an insurance company? A pharmaceutical firm? A government agency? A machine‑-;-learning model designed by someone I will never meet, for purposes I will never know?
Privacy is no longer a legal clause. It is an existential question: Does a human being have the right to keep any part of themselves unobserved?
The digitisation of the body is not an isolated event. It is part of a trajectory we accepted long ago, when we allowed our steps to be counted, our ---sleep--- to be tracked, our heartbeats to be monitored by watches and fitness bands. We told ourselves it was for our health, for a “better lifestyle.” But gradually, the body became a project of self‑-;-surveillance, then a project of external surveillance. What began as a personal choice became a social expectation. Those who do not track themselves appear backward. Those who do not share their data appear suspicious.
The smart pill is simply the next step, more radical because it monitors the body from the inside. It does not track what we do-;- it tracks what we ingest. It does not record behaviour-;- it records compliance. It enters a zone that, until recently, belonged to the realm of the intimate: our relationship with illness, fear, death and the desire to live´-or-delay living.
This is where the philosophical question emerges: If everything inside us becomes measurable and recordable, what remains of the “inside” at all?
If the body becomes an open book, does a person retain the right to opacity, to hesitation, to error, to refusal?
Or are we moving toward a new model of the human being, one who is not allowed to forget a pill,´-or-question a treatment,´-or-delay confronting an illness, because such behaviour will be read as “irrational” and in need of correction?
Then comes the political dimension. A digitised body is not a free body. It is a body embedded in networks of interest: pharmaceutical companies seeking predictable consumption, insurers seeking reduced risk at the expense of the insured, governments seeking to lower healthcare costs, and perhaps security agencies that see health data as part of “national security.”
It is hard not to recall George Orwell, not because he predicted the future, but because he understood the nature of power when given tools of surveillance. Orwell imagined Big Brother watching faces in the street. He did not imagine surveillance entering the body itself, settling in the stomach at the moment a pill dissolves. What was once a camera on a wall is now an antenna in the gut. What was once the monitoring of public behavior is now the monitoring of private biology.
Technology has not disproved Orwell. It has made his warnings look modest.
In this context, the smart pill becomes as much an instrument of control as an instrument of care. Refusing it may be seen as non‑-;-cooperation. Accepting it may place you in a system you cannot exit.
The irony is that all this happens under the banner of “protecting your health.” As if health were no longer a relationship with one’s body, but a contract with a digital system demanding total transparency. Transparency becomes not a virtue, but a requirement for belonging. Those who do not reveal everything about their bodies become burdens, risks,´-or-simply “non‑-;-compliant.”
I return to my old ignorance of medicine and see it differently now. It was not courage, but it was a primitive defense of the right to keep part of myself unmeasured. Today, I cannot defend ignorance, nor reject science. But I can ask a question that feels more radical than any technology: Does a human being have the right to remain, even partially, unknown?
To keep a fragment of the body, of decision, of hesitation, outside the reach of the wireless signal?
Perhaps a day will come when the pill does more than confirm ingestion, when it measures our mood, our anxiety, our sadness, and sends a report on our emotional state to someone, somewhere. At that point, it will not be the body alone that has been digitised, but the emotions themselves. We will have lost not only the privacy of the inside, but the privacy of feeling.
That day has not yet arrived. But it is waving from the horizon. And the smart pill is merely the first step, on a path that begins with the body, and may end with the soul.

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