Reevaluating Bluetooth Low Energy for Ingestible Electronics

TL;DR

This paper reevaluates Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) for ingestible electronics, demonstrating that with an RF amplifier, BLE can provide robust, energy-efficient, and low-latency communication suitable for medical ingestible devices, challenging prior assumptions.

Contribution

The study systematically benchmarks BLE against sub-GHz schemes for ingestible applications, showing BLE's viability with proper configuration and highlighting its advantages in latency, energy efficiency, and system integration.

Findings

BLE with RF amplifier maintains robust tissue communication

BLE achieves lower power consumption for throughput below 100 kbps

BLE offers significantly lower latency than sub-GHz solutions

Abstract

Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) has been widely adopted in wearable devices; however, it has not been widely used in ingestible electronics, primarily due to concerns regarding severe tissue attenuation at the 2.4 GHz band. In this work, we systematically reevaluate the feasibility of BLE for ingestible applications by benchmarking its performance against representative sub-GHz communication schemes across power consumption, throughput, tissue-induced attenuation, latency, and system-level integration constraints. We demonstrate that incorporating an RF amplifier enables BLE to maintain robust communication links through tissue-mimicking media while preserving favorable energy efficiency. We further quantify the relationship between throughput and energy consumption over a wide operating range and demonstrate that, for the majority of ingestible sensing applications with throughput requirements below 100 kbps, BLE achieves substantially lower power consumption than sub-GHz alternatives. End-to-end latency measurements show that BLE offers significantly lower latency than sub-GHz solutions due to its native compatibility with modern computing infrastructure. Finally, we analyze antenna form factor and ecosystem integration, highlighting the mechanical and translational advantages of BLE in ingestible system design. Collectively, these results demonstrate that BLE, when appropriately configured, represents a compelling and scalable wireless communication solution for next-generation ingestible electronics.