Tiny medical bot

posted Jul 7th 2009 9:17am by Caleb Kraft
filed under: Medical hacks, robots hacks

blood-robot-8gwd4

This tiny bot wants to go inside your body. That’s right, it was designed to travel through veins. The little bot has no on board propulsion system. It is controlled by a magnet outside the body. See those little spines? Those straighten out to keep the bot in place when it isn’t supposed to move. Creepy right? In all the articles we’ve seen on this bot, there aren’t any details about what actually is on board. They mention adding a camera in the near future, but why are they calling it a robot? Surely there’s something cool in that little body. This is a quite practical application of a project we covered recently. Commenters weren’t impressed with the external control system, likening it to the old vibrating football player game. Well, here’s where it could be usefull.

Comments [26]

tagged: blood vessel, medical, tiny, vein

Reader Comments

Sounds creepy. What are the chances it gets stuck where it shouldn’t? Or ruptures sensitive tissue? How will they get it in? It’ll probably involve a really large needle for it to fit through. *shudder* I hate needles.

Oh and… how will they get it out? I suppose they can design it to break apart into even smaller bits and be absorbed by the kidneys for you to piss out. *shudder*

Posted at 9:43 am on Jul 7th, 2009 by Project

Probably similar to how a catheter works except smaller, less invasive and less painful.

Posted at 10:08 am on Jul 7th, 2009 by trimzulu

To put it lightly…I would rather die.

Posted at 10:14 am on Jul 7th, 2009 by RobotGuy

Even your normal under the skin ID implant in dogs gives a percentage of them tumors (that data is kept out of the news as much as possible), and those don’t have spikes..

Posted at 10:23 am on Jul 7th, 2009 by Wwhat

wwhat: If memory serves me, the material those are made of is designed to have tissue form around it so that they don’t become dislodged.

Posted at 10:37 am on Jul 7th, 2009 by Mio

reminds me of “the island”. i hope they don’t go in through the eye.

Posted at 10:42 am on Jul 7th, 2009 by djrussell

And that was the day the Borg were born.

Posted at 10:46 am on Jul 7th, 2009 by kronflux

It is spelled straighten. not straiten

Posted at 11:43 am on Jul 7th, 2009 by Jack

It looks like the thing they pulled out of neo in the matrix.

seriously, if these can be built to do anything useful there is huge potential for abuse.

Posted at 11:46 am on Jul 7th, 2009 by agent smith

It doesn’t seem to do anything though, and if it were to have a camera how would it be powered?

Posted at 11:54 am on Jul 7th, 2009 by Jack

@Jack,

Good question, I would guess inductive transfer. You could easily power it up with an external coil, as matter a fact it could work two ways, small ammount of current to “prime” the bot for work, charge up internal storage tank, cap or whatever, , then provide a much stronger magnetic field to repel from.

Posted at 12:45 pm on Jul 7th, 2009 by Roman

It seams a wee bit big doesn’t it? big enough to block blood flow in everything but major arteries.

Posted at 12:48 pm on Jul 7th, 2009 by Sexiewasd

http://www.allhealthcare.com/news/articles/2909-scientists-ready-new-nanobots-to-swim-in-human-blood-stream

Posted at 12:58 pm on Jul 7th, 2009 by sunjester

they look a little bit big but robots keep shrinking so in a few years they should be less painful to think about.

Posted at 1:16 pm on Jul 7th, 2009 by k0ldBurn

well id perfer a needle over the alternative way of getting it into the body… and i dont mean oral.

eather way this reminds me of a new device they are working on… its a micro tv that fits INSIDE your EYE… so you can watch tv and no one is the wiser… can you say mad exgirlfirend?

Posted at 2:31 pm on Jul 7th, 2009 by Vash_SIN

“usefull”? SPELL. CHECK. Use a recent version of Firefox and you have it built RIGHT INTO THE BROWSER!! Pure, unadulterated LAZINESS!

Posted at 3:38 pm on Jul 7th, 2009 by jbotalan

““usefull”? SPELL. CHECK. Use a recent version of Firefox and you have it built RIGHT INTO THE BROWSER!! Pure, unadulterated LAZINESS!”

Attack what people say.. now how they say it..

Posted at 4:26 pm on Jul 7th, 2009 by arthur

not*

Posted at 4:27 pm on Jul 7th, 2009 by arthur

Hmm, what if it was powered by like a little hydro turbine, like if it were to stick onto a blood vessel and allow the blood to travel through it like a small straw, but have a turbine inside, or maybe something like that.

Posted at 8:58 pm on Jul 7th, 2009 by Jack

i bet it sends tweets to twitter…

Posted at 10:35 pm on Jul 7th, 2009 by circuitbomb

it tweets how many white globules you have.

lol

Posted at 11:56 pm on Jul 7th, 2009 by Tomasito

@arthur
It looks like somehow wordpress suppresses the spell check. I’ve been noticing more and more errors slipping by, most of the time it shows 0 misspelled words (HA). I’ll have to come up with another method.

Posted at 6:58 am on Jul 8th, 2009 by Caleb Kraft

@arthur
How ironic

Posted at 8:34 am on Jul 8th, 2009 by omfg

This ‘robot’ is known as the mark of the beast (666). Go ahead, lol. But, i am afraid it is true. If i am not mistaken, whats onboard is said to be capable of reading 1.6 trillion possoble human calculations per second. In the future they hope to incorporate the ability to make it hold ur caily info…bank account, passport, drivers license and other info.

GOT A SECRET? OH WELL, I PROBLY KNOW IT ALREADY

L810…of SOS

Posted at 10:40 am on Jul 8th, 2009 by mizchif

tell me about it…

Posted at 11:09 am on Jul 8th, 2009 by Arthur

Capsule cameras have been around for a while, they too have no (or very limited) propulsion systems so i presume are pretty much the same thing as this? Some of them relay the footage in realtime and can be ‘boosted’ in certain directions to allow more freedom of observation.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capsule_endoscopy

I’ve seen the footage from one (and the form factor) and first impression is definitely wow; they’re developing them so they can do other functions asides from just take footage

Posted at 10:45 am on Jul 10th, 2009 by Alias

Tiny medical bot

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