A child swallows a battery every 3 hours. This remarkable pill-sized origami robot could remove them.

After 1-year-
Old emit Rahe ate a lithium battery and he started vomiting blood, prompting him to go for first aid and emergency surgery.
Later, a doctor likened the toddler\'s throat to setting off firecrackers.
Before Emmet breathed himself, he spent several years and dozens of procedures to rebuild his trachea.
According to a pediatrician\'s estimate, a child swallows a battery every three hours in the United States, equivalent to about 3,300 cases per year.
According to the emergency report, most of the batteries swallowed are button cells.
A shallow silver plate for hearing aids and television sets.
Although death from swallowing button cells is very rare, serious complications occur when the battery is stuck in the child\'s throat, such as the case of Emmet.
Thanks to recent research led by MIT scientists, small robotic devices can one day be used to retrieve allowed objects, including batteries.
Although the new robot cannot perform major esophageal surgery, it may repair smaller wounds in the stomach.
In theory, the only thing a patient has to do is swallow.
It\'s a bit like a wayward fly. In a proof-of-
In the concept experiment presented at the International Robotics and Automation Conference, the small device folds into an ice capsule about the size of a bear glue.
When the ice melts inside the body, the robot unfolds as if it were an origami shot in turn.
Once the origami robot is flattened, it will twist around the stomach, controlled by the use of an external magnetic field by the human operator.
This is not the first device to borrow attributes from origami, which is now a popular source of inspiration for engineers.
Daniela Rus, an electrical engineer at MIT, said in a press release: \"for applications within the body, we need a small, controllable, and unconstrained robotic system . \"
\"If the robot is connected to the tether, it is difficult to control and place the robot in the body.
\"Scientists also need to make robots in a safe situation --to-ingest parts.
The metal pieces and plastic pieces are sharp, so they put their eyes on the food.
\"We spent a lot of time looking for materials in the Asian and Chinatown markets,\" said Li Shuguang of MIT at the press conference . \".
The last iteration of the origami robot is made of a stiff pork shell
The same thing you might find around hot dogs or kielbasa. Swallowing non-
Pharmaceutical equipment has a short but extraordinary medical history.
The first thing that came up with this idea was the vet, who fed the cows magnets --
One of the treatment magnets was patented in 1961
When animals accidentally eat nails or other metal objects.
By the beginning of 2000, the Food and Drug Administration had approved the \"gut camera\", a small camera that allows doctors to observe patients from.
But there is no way to manipulate the early gut camera, if apill-
When the device passes through the colon, the size of the camera happens to be in the wrong direction.
Some scientists are experimenting with robotic pills that can move legs or similar sports.
Other researchers have turned to magnets, pulling magnets in the intestines.
But this approach is not universal medicine, as a pair of Italian biomedical engineers pointed out in the 2010 s in Scientific American.
The magnetic field can \"lose power with distance, and with the irregularity of the intestinal geometry, a sudden change in the magnetic field strength can cause the capsule to jump, or completely cut off the magnetic field control of the pill.
In order to move, this origami robot relies on an external magnetic field, combined with what engineers say is a stick-
Sliding motion, a fast push
Pull on the stomach lining.
Once deployed, the robot can also use its on-
Remove the magnet of the battery from the lining of the stomach.
It will then manipulate the goods through the rest of the digestive system.
So far, MIT researchers have tested origami robots in a synthetic rubber stomach filled with lemon juice and water.
It is not clear when this device can be used in humans.
According to Rus, the next step is to add sensors to the robot and test them in living animals.