Ever wanted to see inside the human body without any drastic measures?
Thanks to a startup called Pillbot, that might soon be possible.
They’ve created a tiny pill that doctors can use to get a live feed from inside your body.
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Alex Luebke, co-founder and engineer at Pillbot, showed off this cool invention during a TED Talk.
He gave the audience a unique demo by swallowing the 'camera' pill.
This pill was then remotely controlled with (get this!) a Sony PlayStation 5 controller by Vivek Kumbhari, a Mayo Clinic professor of medicine and Pillbot co-founder. Meaning the live audience got a deep look inside Luebke's oesophagus and stomach.
'Since the beginning of the modern era, the only way to really look inside was through rudimentary surgeries,' Luebke explained during the presentation, which TED shared on YouTube this week.
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'Over the past 150 years or so, we've had great technologies that allow us to look from the outside, like X-rays and MRIs.
'But what I propose and what I'd like us to explore today is looking at micro-robotics inside the human body.'
Luebke explained that Pillbot reduced the size of its pill from a monstrous 'not quite swallowable' prototype down to the size of a 'small multivitamin capsule.'
The tech is pretty amazing as it 'gets very similar views' than if a 'conventional endoscope' was used, Kumbhari argued. Moreover, if any problems are spotted on the camera, they can be shown and discussed in 'real-time.'
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If you were wondering what happens to the camera afterwards, don't worry - it takes nature's course.
'So now that we're done here, PillBot will take its natural course through and out of the body,' Kumbhari said. 'And fortunately for Alex, he'll have no awareness of this, and he won't have to retrieve this capsule.'
'That was yummy,' Luebke later replied. 'And no, you don't feel anything when the robot moves around inside you.'
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This could mean great news for medical procedures and the potential to ditch invasive camera techniques such as endoscopies and colonoscopies.
Both cofounders now want to use AI to give the tiny pills autonomous control and the ability to create 'maps of the entire interior surface of the stomach,' according to Luebke.
I'm not sure how an AI-controlled device inside our body will sit with most people.