Digital pills: a scoping review of the empirical literature and analysis of the ethical aspects

Background Digital Pills (DP) are an innovative drug-device technology that permits to combine traditional medications with a monitoring system that automatically records data about medication adherence as well as patients’ physiological data. Although DP are a promising innovation in the field of digital medicine, their use has also raised a number of ethical concerns. These ethical concerns, however, have been expressed principally from a theoretical perspective, whereas an ethical analysis with a more empirically oriented approach is lacking. There is also a lack of clarity about the empirical evidence available concerning the application of this innovative digital medicine.