In the quest for weight loss, individuals often endure intense diets, stomach-shrinking procedures, or invest in pricey medications like Ozempic. However, a recent breakthrough, detailed in Science Advances, introduces a gentler and potentially more affordable solution: a vibrating pill designed to activate stomach nerve endings, signaling the brain to halt eating.

Reported as a promising obesity treatment for humans, this innovative capsule significantly reduces food intake in pigs without apparent side effects. Described as a “credible and ingenious approach” by neurobiologist Guillaume de Lartigue, the concept leverages the stomach’s stretching mechanism, which triggers nerve signals informing the brain of fullness.

Conventional obesity treatments, such as fluid-filled stomach balloons or implanted nerve-stimulating devices, have limitations and potential risks. The newly proposed solution, a 31-by-10-millimeter pill with a tiny motor and battery, activates when exposed to stomach fluid. The resulting vibrations, lasting approximately 38 minutes, aim to stimulate stretch-sensing nerve endings, inducing a feeling of satiety.

While the approach is applauded for its creativity and convincing data, some experts question its practicality as a weight loss therapy. Nonetheless, researchers led by Harvard’s Shriya Srinivasan and MIT’s Giovanni Traverso anticipate further development, potentially offering a safer and more accessible solution for combating obesity. All of these ‘practicality’ problems are merely the next conflicts needing to be solved. The most important one is the first one, the one delivering the principal inventive step. This is the one solving the first contradiction: we want to reduce the amount of food that people consume, but the empty volume of our stomach sends a message to our brain that we need to eat. Here’s what that problem looks like when mapped onto the Contradiction Matrix:

I’m still slightly amazed that Principle 18, Vibration, is one of the top recommendations. Having now received that insight, solving the problem of the pill-size (10mm!), durability, removal/disposal safety, cost and no doubt other currently-less-than-ideal attributes is merely about mapping and then solving the new contradictions. Or maybe short-cutting them all and creating a Principle 18 solution that is external and therefore doesn’t need to be ingested at all. Just a thought.