Soft robots, origami combine for potential way to deliver medical
treatments
Magnetic fields allow for wireless, faster, less invasive delivery, study finds
Date:
September 21, 2020
Source:
Ohio State University
Summary:
Researchers have found a way to send tiny, soft robots into humans,
potentially opening the door for less invasive surgeries and ways
to deliver treatments for conditions ranging from colon polyps to
stomach cancer to aortic artery blockages.
FULL STORY ========================================================================== Researchers have found a way to send tiny, soft robots into humans,
potentially opening the door for less invasive surgeries and ways to
deliver treatments for conditions ranging from colon polyps to stomach
cancer to aortic artery blockages.
==========================================================================
The researchers from The Ohio State University and the Georgia Institute
of Technology detailed their discovery, which makes use of the ancient
Japanese practice of origami, in a study published Sept. 14 in the
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Under this system, doctors would use magnetic fields to steer the soft
robot inside the body, bringing medications or treatments to places
that need them, said Renee Zhao, corresponding author of the paper and assistant professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at Ohio State.
"The robot is like a small actuator," Zhao said, "but because we can
apply magnetic fields, we can send it into the body without a tether,
so it's wireless. That makes it significantly less invasive than our
current technologies." That soft robot is made of magnetic polymer, a
soft composite embedded with magnetic particles that can be controlled remotely. Robotic delivery of medical treatment is not a new concept,
but most previous designs used traditional robots, made of stiff,
hard materials.
The "soft" component of this robot is crucial, Zhao said.
==========================================================================
"In biomedical engineering, we want things as small as possible, and
we don't want to build things that have motors, controllers, tethers
and things like that," she said. "And an advantage of this material is
that we don't need any of those things to send it into the body and get
it where it needs to go." The soft origami robot in this case can be
used to deliver multiple treatment selectively based on the independently controlled folding and deploying of the origami units. The origami allows
the material to "open" when it reaches the site, unfurling the treatment
along with it and applying the treatment to the place in the body that
needs it.
This origami-style delivery of medication is also not new, but because
previous designs relied on more cumbersome, bulky ways of activating or
opening the origami to deliver the medication, those deliveries were often slow. Some did not allow for medication to be delivered to a pinpointed location in the body.
The soft robot, Zhao said, removes some of that bulkiness. The magnetic
fields allowed the researchers, in the lab, to control the direction,
intensity and speed of the material's folding and deployment.
Researchers conducted this work in a lab, not in the human body. But
the technology, they think, could allow doctors to control the robot
from outside the body using only magnetic fields.
"In this design, we don't even need any chip, we don't need any electric circuit," she said. "By just applying the external field, the material can respond itself -- it does not need any wired connection." These findings
may have applications beyond delivering medicine, said Glaucio Paulino,
a co-author on the paper and professor and Raymond Allen Jones Chair in
the Georgia Tech School of Civil and Environmental Engineering.
"We anticipate that the reported magnetic origami system is applicable
beyond the bounds of this work, including future origami-inspired robots, morphing mechanisms, biomedical devices and outer space structures,"
Paulino said.
This work was supported by the National Science Foundation.
========================================================================== Story Source: Materials provided by Ohio_State_University. Original
written by Laura Arenschield. Note: Content may be edited for style
and length.
========================================================================== Journal Reference:
1. Larissa S. Novelino, Qiji Ze, Shuai Wu, Glaucio H. Paulino,
Ruike Zhao.
Untethered control of functional origami microrobots with
distributed actuation. Proceedings of the National Academy of
Sciences, 2020; 202013292 DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2013292117 ==========================================================================
Link to news story:
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/09/200921102551.htm
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