WebZine
2019. 3
What's New
Tiny origami-inspired devices opening up new possibilities for minimally-invasive surgery
Some of the tech recently licensed to Intuitive Surgical, leader in robotic surgery
BYU mechanical engineering professors Larry Howell and Spencer Magleby have made a name for themselves by applying the principles of origami to engineering. Now they’re applying their origami skills to a new realm: the human body.
The duo, along with professor Brian Jensen and their students, are working toward surgical technology that will allow for the manufacturing of instruments so small that the size of incisions necessary to accommodate the tools can heal on their own—without sutures.
“The whole concept is to make smaller and smaller incisions,” Howell said. “To that end, we’re creating devices that can be inserted into a tiny incision and then deployed inside the body to carry out a specific surgical function.”
As a part of their work, BYU just licensed a series of compliant mechanism technologies to Intuitive Surgical, the world leader in robotic surgery and the maker of the popular da Vinci Surgical System. The deal is the latest in a number of collaborations with Intuitive Surgical, which connected with BYU on advice from the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy.
The researchers say their work is inspired by a need for increasingly smaller surgical tools; the industry has reached the limit to where they can’t go any smaller with traditional designs. BYU’s team has engineered new design concepts that eliminate the need for pin joints and other parts, instead relying on the deflection inherent in origami to create motion.
“These small instruments will allow for a whole new range of surgeries to be performed—hopefully one day manipulating things as small as nerves,” Magleby said. “The origami-inspired ideas really help us to see how to make things smaller and smaller and to make them simpler and simpler.”
One such instrument is a robotically-controlled forceps so small it can pass through a hole about 3 millimeters in size—roughly the thickness of two pennies held together.
Monitoring Heart Health, One Toilet Seat at a Time
This smart seat keeps tabs on your heart while you take care of business
Time and again, studies show that people are not good at consistently taking medication, following health care plans, or regularly recording health information, even when our doctor tells us to.
And that’s a big problem in health care. In fact, the World Health Organization says that getting people to adhere to medical interventions could have a greater impact on world health than any specific medical treatment.
Now, a team at the Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT) in New York has come up with a clever way to get patients with heart failure to track their heart health—let a toilet do it for them.
Sensors in a new battery-powered, cloud-connected toilet seat track blood pressure, blood oxygen levels, and other heart data as accurately as hospital-grade monitoring equipment in a small group of patients, according to a study in the January issue of the journal JMIR mHealth and uHealth.
The idea of a “smart toilet” isn't new—Google has a patent on a health-tracking toilet and Japanese manufacturers Toto and Matsushita (now part of Panasonic) have each developed Wi-Fi–connected toilets—but most health-related toilet technologies focus on urine and stool analysis inside the bowl, rather than tracking vital signs using sensors in the seat.
Regular visits to the RIT-developed seat—which involve no more time or effort than a usual trip to the commode—could indicate if a patient’s heart health is worsening and they need to see a doctor, though that claim will need to be tested in a clinical trial. If the monitoring system works as expected, the device could help catch early signs of heart decline and decrease the number of hospitalizations for heart patients.
The only current FDA-approved heart failure monitor, the CardioMEMs HF System, involves implantation of a small pressure sensor into an artery near the heart and requires a patient to lie down on a bedlike electronics unit once per day to capture data.
“We wanted something that can work for everybody, without any change in behavior or habit required,” says toilet seat study coauthor Nicholas Conn, a postdoctoral researcher at RIT.
