Irritable bowel syndrome (IBS) continues to vex patients and physicians alike. IBS affects an estimated 10% to 15% of Americans, and many sufferers experience debilitating diarrhea, constipation and abdominal pain. Despite this effect, our understanding of what causes the disorder and how best to manage it is limited.

“Physicians struggle with diagnosing and treating IBS,” said Patricia Sylla, MD, FACS, associate professor of surgery in the Department of Colorectal Surgery at Mount Sinai Hospital, in New York City. “Any way to further our understanding of IBS could have great therapeutic value.”

In 2008, Uday S. Devanaboyina, PhD, founded the startup tech company G-Tech Medical with the concept of building a noninvasive device that could measure electric signals along the digestive tract and identify the gastrointestinal motility issues responsible for these pervasive symptoms.

When Steve Axelrod, PhD, the company’s president and CEO, joined G-Tech in 2011, the idea began to take shape. With funding and support from the Thiel Foundation’s Breakout Labs and later from the Fogarty Institute for Innovation, Dr. Axelrod and his team have developed a thin, lightweight, waterproof wireless patch that can attach to the skin and measure electrical activity from the stomach, small intestine and colon. The design allows patients to wear the patches during their daily activities while data are recorded in real time and uploaded to an online database for analysis.

“Our ultimate goal is to create a patch that can help doctors study patterns of gut behavior and find the underlying cause of a person’s issues,” Dr. Axelrod said.

GutCheck is a wireless patch that attaches to the skin and measures electrical activity from the stomach, small intestine and colon. A team is currently studying whether it can help distinguish patients at risk for postoperative ileus.

Currently, Dr. Axelrod and his team are in the early stages of testing. A recent proof-of-concept analysis, presented at the 2014 annual meeting of the American College of Gastroenterology, showed that it is possible to measure electric signals from the digestive organs noninvasively. In the study, Dr. Axelrod and his team placed EKG patches simulating the GutCheck patch on the bellies of 11 healthy controls and 77 people who suffered from a range of GI symptoms, including constipation, diarrhea, pain and bloating. After recording and analyzing gut activity before and after eating, the team was able to map out signals corresponding to motor activity in the stomach, colon and small intestine. The researchers also found they could differentiate between the gut function of controls and those with GI symptoms.

More recently, the team at G-Tech, led by Anand Navalgund, PhD, and researcher Lindsay Axelrod, presented two posters at the 2016 Digestive Disease Week, which were finalists in the Young Investigator Competition. The two analyses expanded on the original feasibility data: One abstract investigated the optimum placement of the patches based on motor activity signal strength at various locations on the abdomen, and the other examined the data for potentially diagnostically useful signal patterns in patients with gastroparesis and reflux disease.

With this feasibility research in hand, the team is now studying whether the GutCheck patch can help physicians distinguish patients at risk for postoperative ileus. “Postoperative ileus is an ideal first indication,” Dr. Axelrod said, who is currently enrolling two clinical trials to determine how effectively the patch can monitor patients’ intestinal recovery after abdominal surgery and identify those at risk for developing an ileus.

“We hope to find signs in the data that indicate which patients will go on to develop post-op ileus,” Dr. Axelrod said. “If we can pinpoint the early signs of ileus and identify which organ is responsible, we can treat it sooner and provide more targeted therapies.”

Dr. Sylla agrees that we need novel methods to observe patients after abdominal surgery. “If we could better monitor patients postoperatively and better anticipate when they are developing signs of bowel dysfunction, such as an ileus or bowel obstruction, it could trigger earlier intervention, and ultimately improve patient recovery, reduce length of stay, readmissions and overall costs,” said Dr. Sylla, who has not used the device. “[The GutCheck patch] is a good concept with potential clinical utility, but only if the technology can be used to accurately predict and capture clinically meaningful changes in electrical signals before patients start experiencing symptoms.”

Although it is too soon to tell how effective the patch will be, if successful, the device could offer a unique glimpse into the function of the digestive tract.

“Once we validate our technology in these early clinical studies, we hope to run extensive tests on many patients to understand how this information can be used to glean the underlying causes of common GI symptoms, and ultimately help physicians develop more targeted therapies to bring better and faster relief,” Dr. Axelrod said.