Self-Propelled Robots are Ready to Enter Your Bloodstream

In the future zapping a blood clot or intravenously administering drugs might be as simple as swallowing a microchip , and quite frankly, from the illustrated looks of things, it sort of resembles a space cruiser.

Ada Poon, an assistant professor at the Stanford School of Engineering, presented the device prototype yesterday at the International Solid-State Circuits Conference. Electrically powered implanted medical technology, such as the pacemaker and insulin pumps, have been around for years, but so far, one of the largest challenges towards advancing these technologies have been the cumbersome methods of powering them. They often require large battery packs that take up over half of a device’s volume. There are also a number of barriers to radio transmissions inside the human body.

Poon’s device would revolutionize this framework in the sense that it uses an outside radio transmitter to pick up wireless signals, and coupled with an antenna, used change in blood current to produce volage to propel itself through the body. That mean no battery, and chip small enough to navigate tight channels and vessels from within the body. The thing is about a quarter the size of a penny.

Poon’s research had to re-configure the way mathematicians though about electricity within the human body. For the last fifty years, most scientific research done regarding electrical current in human tissue, relied on the assumption that muscle, fat and bone tissues were good conductors of electricity, and therefore relegated to a specific sub-set of equations know as Maxwell’s Equations, which help form the underlying framework used in classical electrodynamics.

Poon decided to approach the problem of electrical current in human tissue from a dielectric model, where tissue acts as an insulator, with surprising findings. Turns out, human tissues are actually poor conductors of electricity, but still an excellent conductors of radio waves. In fact, the optimal frequency for powering these little chips inside the body is around one gigahertz, or about 100 times higher than she had originally thought.

Your doc may not be prescribing you microchips anytime in the near future, but stealth looking, blood vessel cruising little robot microchips may one day be used to treat your blood clot or diagnose a condition. Maybe they aren’t the medical robots people initially had in mind, but they’re still pretty awesome.