LISTEN: Hearing the signals of the body in real time: What new technologies could mean for patients with autoimmune digestive disorders

By Kimberly Henrickson
Medill Reports  

Maybe you track your steps and heart rate using a fitness tracker, or you know someone with diabetes who wears a continuous glucose monitor. Wearable technology is part of a broader shift in health care toward “precision medicine,” or patient care that relies heavily on data to deliver the most personalized treatments possible. For patients with autoimmune digestive disorders, including Crohn’s disease and ulcerative colitis, wearable technology could help doctors stop inflammation before it spins out of control. Kimberly Henrickson investigated the development of different wearable device technologies, including fitness trackers, sweat sensors, and biosensors, to understand what they could mean to the people who need them most.  

Editor’s note: This reporting was partially enabled by a grant from Biohub.  

Transcript

Hossein Zargartalebi: It’s about replacing guesswork with action, replacing waiting with action, replacing guesswork with clarity, and giving people back the most fragile and powerful thing of all: time. Time to act early. Time to recover fully. Time to live. Not as patients, but as people. That’s the future I believe in. 

Henrickson: This is “Hearing the signals of the body in real time: What new technologies could mean for patients with inflammatory digestive disorders.” You just heard from Hossein Zargartalebi, a fellow at the Chicago Biohub who holds a Ph.D. in mechanical engineering. In that clip, which came from a TedTalk Hossein gave in September 2025, Hossein was talking about research he is working on that uses continuous protein monitoring to track inflammation within the body. Maybe you track your steps and heart rate using a fitness tracker, or know someone with diabetes who wears a continuous glucose monitor. In the world of wearable technology, we’ve come a long way since the pedometers we used to put on for gym class. Wearable tech is part of a broader shift in health care towards precision medicine, or patient care that relies heavily on data to deliver the most personalized treatments possible. technology, we’ve come a long way since the pedometers we used to put on for gym class. Wearable tech is part of a broader shift in health care towards precision medicine, or patient care that relies heavily on data to deliver the most personalized treatments possible.  

For one category of patients, wearable tech could allow inflammation to be stopped before it spins out of control. This episode is going to focus on the significance of wearable tech for patients with autoimmune inflammatory disorders of the digestive system. This cluster of conditions is often referred to as inflammatory bowel disease, or IBD, and includes Crohn’s disease and ulcerative colitis. According to the CDC, between 2.4 and 3.1 million people in the United States have a form of inflammatory bowel disease. To understand more about the potentials of this technology, I spoke with a patient, doctors and researchers working on the tech. You’ll hear from them directly, but first, here are a few definitions.  

Gastroenterology, or GI in medical speak, is the branch of medicine that diagnoses and manages disorders relating to the stomach and intestines, including IBD. Your immune system is supposed to fight off intruders, but if you have one of these conditions, your immune system acts inappropriately, attacking healthy bacteria and cells in digestive tissue. This causes swelling and inflammation in the digestive tract. IBD is a lifelong condition that is typically managed by medications. When patients have gone a long period of time without severe symptoms, they are classified as “in remission.” If someone in remission starts experiencing symptoms again, it is called a “flare-up.”  

Now let’s turn to the experts. First, a patient. Jenna Fattah is a New York City attorney who was diagnosed with Crohn’s disease in her late teens. Here’s her describing what a flare feels like. 

Jenna Fattah: I kind of describe it like a thunderstorm; where it starts, the sky starts getting a little gray, cloudy, the temperature drops, you start to feel an increase in the wind. That’s kind of what a flare is like. You start seeing the signs, but they’re subtle, and if you’re not looking, you can miss them. And then all of a sudden you hear the clap of thunder and, you know, OK, I’m in a thunderstorm, I’m in a flare-up. 

Henrickson: When an IBD patient realizes they’re starting a flare, their medical team can provide interventions to prevent it from getting worse. Here’s Dr. Rebecca Yao, a gastroenterology fellow at University of Chicago, explaining more. 

Rebecca Yao: When someone has flare symptoms, so when someone is calling in and says, you know, they’re having a lot more abdominal pain recently, diarrhea … and especially when they tell us like, this feels just like a flare that I’ve had before, because IBD patients tend to have a very good understanding of their body and what their flares feel like, and when something is wrong that doesn’t feel like a flare … when it feels like a flare, we can typically start anti-inflammatory medications pretty early on. Sometimes that’s just in the form of oral pills, like steroids that calm down the inflammation in their gut. But sometimes when it’s really severe, we can also use stronger forms of suppressing the immune system. So IV steroids, and even in, like sort of last-ditch efforts, there’s even stronger, sort of immune-calming things that we can use. 

Henrickson: Typically, the state of one’s inflammation is measured through invasive testing procedures such as colonoscopy or endoscopy, where a camera is inserted into a person’s body, or through biopsies, or through blood tests. According to Dr. Yao, one limitation of these methods is time. Often, patients have to wait days for results, which delays clinicians’ abilities to prescribe interventions. 

Yao: As you can imagine, these tests don’t come back with results instantly. In fact, especially with the stool tests, they sometimes take many days to result. And so in that time frame, if you don’t have any idea about what’s going on, it can be really hard to make decisions early. 

Henrickson: These invasive methods may soon be replaced by new technologies under development, which would not only be less invasive, but could offer continuous real-time information. 

Yao: When it comes to things like biosensors, the promise that they hold is to really help, one is if they can give you information about inflammation as it’s happening, you could provide treatment earlier. And so someone doesn’t have to be, you know, as miserable as they potentially could be as their flare gets worse, and you could potentially prevent unnecessarily hospitalizations, potentially even emergency surgeries, if you’re able to intervene on the flare sooner rather than later. And when it comes to using biosensors to even predict inflammation before someone even starts getting symptoms, you know, there’s the thought that if a patient were to know about it sooner, before they start having diarrhea or abdominal pain, or any of the other symptoms that are associated with a flare, they could potentially do some of these other things, like watching their diet a little bit more and maybe sleeping more, maybe focusing on stress management. 

Henrickson: Dr. Alvin George, a GI fellow at University of Chicago, is adapting fitness tracker technology, which has already shown promising results for measuring cardiac conditions, to the GI space. Have you ever wondered how fitness trackers work? It all has to do with a small beam of light emitted from the device. Here’s how Dr. George explained it to me. 

Alvin George: (Analyzing the) data, (it) finds different characteristics in your blood just by knowing how the blood is interacting with that light and how it’s absorbing it. 

Henrickson: This mode of data collection is called photoplethysmography, or PPG, and collects data in waveforms. I know what you’re thinking. It’s 2026. I’m listening to a podcast about technology. I haven’t heard the words artificial intelligence yet. Well, that comes into the analysis of the data collected by the trackers, and what Dr. George is working on. 

George: We’re able to, you know, use some of the data that these devices are already gathering and use our own algorithms, which all use some sort of AI technology. Analyzing, using our own proprietary way of analyzing that, and showing, and proving that, this way of analyzing it is correlating to relevant IBD symptoms and outcomes. (That,) I think is the way to go about doing it. 

Henrickson: Another technology under development is the IBD Aware device. According to its developer, EnLiSense, this device consists of a small plastic reader that attaches to the body with a sweat-sensing strip. You might not have thought about it like this before, but sweat is actually a biofluid that contains proteins, including inflammatory markers, which are similar to those present in the blood. The IBD Aware device would allow for continuous remote monitoring of protein levels that currently require blood tests. It could also allow doctors to see how patients’ bodies respond to treatments in real time. According to EnLiSense, IBD Aware is only currently available for investigational use, but is anticipated to undergo FDA regulatory submission. If cleared by the FDA, clinicians would be able to prescribe it to their patients.  

Interstitial fluid, which is fluid located within tissue, has also been shown to be a potentially viable alternative to blood testing because of its similar composition to blood plasma. In the beginning of this episode, I introduced you to Hossein Zargartalebi, who is developing a biosensor technology that would be dependent on this fluid. The biosensor Hossein is working on would be a minimally invasive, implantable wearable. According to Hossein, a tiny microneedle would insert into the dermis layer of the skin, drawing interstitial fluid from the tissue. This would minimize tissue disruption and would have a wide variety of uses, from tracking small molecules to large proteins and enzymes. Patients would wear it continuously, collecting real-time data on how their biomarkers fluctuated throughout their days. 

Zargartalebi: Depending on what type of disease that we are targeting, we can select a specific type of the preliminary biomarkers and then try to track them. 

Henrickson: Here’s what Hossein had to say about his goals for the technology. 

Zargartalebi: With the continuous monitoring, we could allow physicians to kind of adjust therapy based on the molecular activity rather than just delayed symptoms. And finally, I would say that the vision is not just, just more data. It’s like better timing of intervention, reducing hospitalization, for sure. And also more, personalized treatment decisions, according to the information that we receive. 

Henrickson: This device is being developed for a wide range of uses. Jenna, the person with Crohn’s who we heard from earlier, said that she currently tracks her symptoms manually, which consumes a lot of time and mental energy. She’s hopeful about the new technologies that are under development. 

Fattah: A sense of peace. Knowing that I don’t have to be thinking about this, knowing that I can rely on a piece of technology to keep track of this for me, and to be confident that, oh, if I, if it’s, my numbers are not going up, it doesn’t mean that the sensor is not working, it means that I’m OK and that things are OK. 

Henrickson: It comes back to what Hassan said in his TEDx talk about time. Isn’t that our most valuable asset? 

Fattah: Any move towards that sort of progress, to be able to tell as early as possible when I may be in a flare-up, that is worth its weight in gold. 

Henrickson: This reporting was partially enabled by a grant from Biohub. Thank you to Dr. Alvin George and Dr. Rebecca Yao, both of the University of Chicago, Hossein Zargartalebi of the Biohub and Jenna Fattah. This has been Kimberly Henrickson for Medill Reports. 

Kimberly Henrickson is a health, environment and science specialization graduate student at Medill.