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Like these? I'm kinda glad they're inedible.

There are three brands of PillCams (look up capsule endoscopy) already on the market. They are smaller than the body of a dragonfly and can broadcast live video images to a receiver. Just add wings and a more powerful antenna and you have your dragonfly-sized spy plane. The FBI says it doesn’t have anything like that because it’s probably already obsolete.

Why bother spying at a public gathering? To see if anyone noticed, is my guess. And they did. There must have been something unnatural about the way they moved when they flapped their wings, kind of the way bats don’t look like birds.

Camsnuffling, not camstuffing. This is camstuffing... http://www.givenimaging.com/Cultures/en-US/given/e nglish

http://www.givenimaging.com/ make the only existing swallowable endoscopy camera on the market, and yes, the drugs for conventional endoscopy are a solid hit.

M2A Capsule Endoscopy has been utilized to diagnose a range of diseases of the small intestine including Crohn's Disease, Celiac disease and other malabsorption disorders, benign and malignant tumors of the small intestine, vascular disorders, medication related small bowel injury, as well as a range of pediatric small bowel disorders.

There are Pictures and Videos here of what the camera records.

Amazingly, "In a normal (eight hour) procedure the M2A capsule generates approximately 57,000 images, at a rate of two frames per second."

M2A Capsule Endoscopy has been utilized to diagnose a range of diseases of the small intestine including Crohn's Disease, Celiac disease and other malabsorption disorders, benign and malignant tumors of the small intestine, vascular disorders, medication related small bowel injury, as well as a range of pediatric small bowel disorders.

There are Pictures and Videos here of what the camera records.

Amazingly, "In a normal (eight hour) procedure the M2A capsule generates approximately 57,000 images, at a rate of two frames per second."

Here are the pictures from the pictures from Given Imaging web site.

So how do they possibly justify asking $20000 just to look at the low-resolution images coming out of this ovoid?

From their FAQ:

" 10Q. What function does the RAPID(TM) software perform?

10A. After the patient returns the Given® Data Recorder to the physician and the data has been downloaded from the recorder to the RAPID(TM) Workstation, Given's proprietary RAPID(TM) software performs advanced image and data processing on the video and data. It transforms them into a video that may be viewed and reviewed by the physician offline at a rate faster or slower than real-time."

You've got to forgive me for being skeptical. Image sequencing and processing? Here's a link to a screenshot of their software: http://www.givenimaging.com/usa/product.asp?x=4&y= 1
Yup, that's either Win2k or WinME. On x86 hardware. Perhaps there's specialized hardware for downloading the data, but it can't be that complicated. And the total cost of the hardware can't be more than $1000, not to mention that most doctor's offices don't need another Wintel box.

The only reason I can imagine for forcing you to buy an entire Windows workstation just to look at pictures with a pretty front-end is so that they can recoup some of the development costs involved in making the pill and the costs of running clinical trials.

$20000 still seems pretty extravagent.

This article (cleaned up from link of previous poster) talks about how white LEDs helped make this possible... I was wondering how they planned to illuminate that without fiberoptics. I wonder how much tumble there is to the thing, if they might miss something interesting because the camera faced the wrong way as it passed through the system.
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