Aiming at improved dog food,Cambridge Design Partnership has created a smart pill for dogs that both senses and samples.

Mars is the customer, and trails were at the Waltham Centre for Pet Nutrition in Melton Mowbray.

“It was certainly an unusual request and a major challenge,” says Will Bradley, who led the project for CDP. “Mars Petcare wanted to find out more about how dog food is digested, with the aim of improving their pet food. They needed samples of partially-digested food from exact locations in the gut that they could gather in complete safety for the dog.”

The pill, about the size of a grape, has a pH sensor so that it detects when it has passed from the acidity of the stomach into the intestine.

Using a piston mechanism, the pill then takes a food sample and closes up to protect the sample for the rest of its journey through the dog’s digestive tract.

It can be tracked on its journey. “Once it was clear that the pill worked, Mars Petcare asked us if we could also find a way of knowing accurately where it was as it passes through the dog,” says CDP team member Mike Cane. “So we also devised an interactive coat to be worn by the dog which picks up a radio signal from the pill.”

Data from the resultant food trials is soon to be published in a scientific journal, according to Cane.