WebZine
2017.03
What's New
The Tiny Robots Will See You Now
By Megan Scudellari
Posted 1 Mar 2017 | 19:00 GMT
Now it’s time to pay homage to their teeny, tiny counterparts.
It’s science-fiction-turned-reality: Researchers are developing micro- and nanoscale robots that move freely in the body, communicate with each other, perform jobs, and degrade when their mission is complete. These tiny robots will someday “have a major impact” on disease diagnosis, treatment, and prevention, according to a new review in Science Robotics from a top nanoengineering team at the University of California, San Diego
In Hospital ICUs, AI Could Predict Which Patients Are Likely to Die
By Eliza Strickland
Posted 7 Mar 2017 | 18:00 GMT
Hospitals have an understandable goal for their intensive care units: to reduce “dead in bed” events.
With streams of data coming from equipment that monitors patients’ vital signs, the ICU seems the perfect setting to deploy artificially intelligent tools that could judge when a patient is likely to take a turn for the worse. “A lot of hospitals are interested in developing early warning systems that can predict life-threatening events like sepsis, cardiac arrest, and respiratory arrest,” says Priyanka Shah of the ECRI Institute, a nonprofit that evaluates medical procedures, devices, and drugs for the health care industry.
The review highlights four areas of medicine where tiny robots have been successfully used in proof-of-concept studies: targeted delivery, precision surgery, sensing of biological targets, and detoxification. Of those, “active drug delivery is primarily the most promising commercial application of medical microrobots,” said paper co-author Joseph Wang, chair of nanoengineering at UCSD, in an email to IEEE Spectrum. In December, for example, researchers at ETH Zurich in Switzerland showed that a wire-shaped nanorobot could be wirelessly steered toward a location and then triggered by a magnetic field to release drugs to kill cancer cells.
To get to know these little machines better before we meet them in the doctor’s office, here are five things to know about micro- and nanorobots:
1. They are hard to move—and even harder to power.
Two of the key challenges of miniaturizing robots to the micro- and nanoscales are locomotion and power. You simply can’t fit gears or a battery on these guys. Many of the robots employ a swimming strategy and are either chemically powered or externally powered by magnetic fields or other energies, including light, heat, or electricity. One of Wang’s favorites is a “nanorocket” his team developed that propels itself in the stomach or gastrointestinal tract using gastric fluid as fuel and leaving a trail of bubbles in its wake. Still, the field continues to look for new energy sources that last longer that current sources and will work autonomously, without a technician’s intervention.
Both academic researchers and medical device companies are now trying to figure out which combinations of measurements can provide the best indication of patient deterioration, Shah says. Once that technical challenge is met, researchers will still have to prove “clinical relevance,” she says—not just proof that the technology works, but also that it can be integrated into a hospital’s workflow and that it will save money.
Dealing with FDA regulators, set-in-their-ways clinicians, and money-conscious hospital administrators may be the more daunting part of the mission to smarten up the ICU. Because on the technical front, the research is promising.