“We were very surprised that posture had such an immense effect on the dissolution rate of a pill,” said senior author Rajat Mittal, a Johns Hopkins engineer and an expert in fluid dynamics. “I never thought about whether I was doing it right or wrong but now I’ll definitely think about it every time I take a pill.”
The model developed by the team, called StomachSim, appears to be one of the first to be able to conduct realistic simulation of the human stomach which mimics what is happening inside a stomach as it digests food, or in this case, medicine.