ingesters

Ingesters are entities that take in material through ingestion. In biology, an ingester refers to an organism that consumes food or other substances, initiating digestion by introducing material into the digestive tract.

Biological ingesters vary widely. Herbivores, carnivores, omnivores, filter feeders, and detritivores all rely on ingestion to obtain energy. Ingestion methods range from chewing with teeth to suction feeding or filter feeding, and the swallowed material is acted upon by digestive enzymes and peristaltic movement.

In data engineering, an ingester is a component that collects data from sources and delivers it into storage or processing systems. Typical duties include data collection, buffering, parsing and normalization, schema validation, deduplication, and routing to destinations such as data lakes, warehouses, or streaming pipelines. Ingestion can be batch-based or real-time, and it often involves connectors, transformers, and error handling.

In medical and consumer health contexts, ingestible devices are swallowable sensors or cameras that monitor the gastrointestinal tract or report physiological data. Examples include pill-like sensors and ingestible cameras used for diagnostics. These devices must meet safety, regulatory, and privacy requirements, and data from them is typically transmitted to external receivers for analysis.

The term also appears in other domains, but core ideas remain ingestion-driven entry of material into a system, whether biological, digital, or medical.