The next time you have an ailment with your tummy, your doctor might not prescribe you any kind of pills or medicine. Rather, he or she might actually pass you an origami-inspired robot, and ask you to swallow that with a glass of water. This is rather unnerving when you think about it, but the relief that you will feel afterwards might be worth the effort and chance.
This is an ingestible robot that will be able to target a foreign object within your tummy to get rid of it, or perhaps to be able to patch up an internal wound. Once it has done its job, it will then decompose without leaving a trace behind. Made possible by a team of researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, it is truly a minimally invasive method of using biocompatible and biodegradable miniature robots in order to perform tasks from within the human body.
Made mostly from dried pig intestines, these small robots do resemble the love child of a caterpillar and an accordion. A small tiny magnet enables it to be maneuvered by a tuneable external magnetic field. What do you think of such intelligent little devices moving in and around our bodies? Nano-medicine looks set to be the future, that is for sure.
Filed in . Read more about Science. Source: livescience