Stanford engineers develop tiny robots to treat patients from the inside

If you’re not a fan of swallowing pills, how about swallowing a robotic doctor instead? A team at Stanford University has developed what it calls a ‘millirobot’ smaller than a fingertip, which is able to enter the human body and have a look around, identifying and treating complex diseases. The team are working on several different robot designs, including one that can ‘crawl’ using the motion generated by magnetic fields, and can fold itself over to get around obstacles. The ‘spinning-enabled wireless amphibious origami millirobot’ (might we suggest a catchier name?) can carry medicine until it reaches the precise location in the body it’s needed in, allowing for super-targeted drug delivery. The project is still in the very early trial stages, not having yet reached animal testing, but you could be looking at the future of medicine. If you can actually see it, of course.