A new swallowable pill has been trialled with 50 firefighters in Australia, aimed at monitoring body temperatures and other vital readings when working under extreme conditions. Using Equivital's EQ02 LifeMonitor capsule, the pill transmits metrics to a device housed on the chest. This then sends data on skin temperature, heart rate and respiration rate to an external computer. If a firefighter's core body temperature is increasing too quickly, they can then be moved from the frontline to a recovery area, hopefully reducing accidents and deaths caused by heat exhaustion
