Medicine and the Metaverse: New technology allows doctors to travel inside your body

The world of technology is rapidly moving from third-person flat media to first-person immersive media. This major shift in mainstream computing, recently dubbed the “meta-version,” has sparked a new wave of excitement around the core technologies of virtual and augmented reality. But there is a third area of ​​technology known as telepresence that is often overlooked but becomes an important part of Metavas.

While virtual reality brings users into a virtual world, telepresence (also called telerobotics) uses remote robots to bring users to distant locations, allowing them to look around and perform complex tasks. This concept dates back to 1940s science fiction and by Robert A. Heinlein goes back in time with a seminal short story called Waldo. If we combine that concept with another sci-fi tale, Fantastic Voyage (1966), we can imagine tiny robotic ships swimming around under the control of doctors who enter the body and examine patients from the inside and even perform surgeries. .

I know that sounds like pure fiction, but a startup company in Hayward, California, recently “put” a tiny robot inside the human digestive system. The company is Indiatex, and I had the opportunity to chat with their CEO, Torrey Smith, about their technology and vision. As a technologist who has been involved in telepresence research since the early days, I am impressed by the progress Indiax has made. But before I get into that, let’s step back a few decades and provide some context as to why their discovery struck me as an unexpected breakthrough.

The first telerobotic prototype

My first experience with an immersive telerobotics system was thirty years ago. I still remember the first time I looked into a headset, holding periscope-like handles and looking into a room that wasn’t the room I was sitting in. It was 1991 and I was working in a NASA lab. It had the first examples of mobile telerobotic systems. Developed by Fake Space Labs and Telepresence Research, it lets you control a mobile robot with a camera system that sends stereoscopic images back in real time. A picture of that early system showing the state of the art in telepresence research thirty years ago is a photo from an academic paper on those efforts.

That early system was amazing at the time and was developed by some of the top researchers in the field. But if you want to bring hardware to a trade show, you’ll probably need a good-sized van or perhaps a U-Haul truck. The idea of ​​such a system being reduced to the amount one person could swallow and under the supervision of a doctor was beyond imagination. So what were the intended application areas in the early days of telepresence?

Previously, the focus was on enabling human operators to work in hazardous areas, for example, to clean up nuclear disasters, repair satellites, and even repair leaking oil wells on the ocean floor. My personal focus in the early 1990s was the addition of augmented reality and haptic feedback to the field of telepresence with the goal of improving operator performance. This was excellent research at the time, but I never imagined that the technology would have fallen to such an extent that it “flows” through the human body to diagnose and treat patients from the inside.

He realized ‘a wonderful journey’

For these reasons, I was surprised to learn about the great vision and recent technical success of the team at Endiatx. In the year Founded in 2019, they have developed tiny robotic drones that can be swallowed by human patients and guided remotely through the stomach and other digestive organs. Known as PillBot™, their prototype system is basically a small remote-controlled submarine the size of a multivitamin that sends real-time video to a doctor’s computer or phone. And it works – they’ve done tests on cadavers and living people.

When we chatted with CEO Torrey Smith, he told me that he was inspired by the sci-fi movie Innerspace (1987) as a kid and had been thinking about that concept ever since. A few years ago, he finally took the plunge, creating Endiax to bring this concept to life. And it’s going well so far. Not only has his company brought this capability to a healthcare delivery product, but Torrey himself is the first person on the planet to fly a robotic drone in its stomach. He swallowed the first prototype that made it true and gave it willingly A wonderful trip.

After that initial test, others at the company took the working prototype several times, one day recording live video to screen patients for ulcers, stomach cancer, and other possible ailments. And that day isn’t far off—the team is currently conducting autopsies with doctors at the Mayo Clinic and planning trials for FDA approval. If all goes well, PillBot could be diagnosing patients around the world by 2024.

This can be of great benefit to individuals who go to the doctor with stomach pain. Instead of a standard endoscopy procedure that generally requires sedation and involves multiple visits, the tiny robot saves time, money and complexity, giving doctors a quick and easy way to look around inside their patients. And the unconnected Pillbot has the full 3D mobility of a small robotic submarine, so it can provide more flexible control than a traditional endoscope. It even looks like a tiny sub with micromotors and tiny propellers with a video camera, battery, and wireless connection to feed images to doctors in real time.

Fast, cheap and accurate screenings

Currently, doctors can fly the tiny drone using a standard Xbox gaming controller, but the company plans to control it using the touch screen of any mobile phone. That’s because their vision is a disposable unit that can be swallowed during a telemedicine consultation with your doctor that is sent to your home and reviews the camera feed from your computer or phone. Indiatex believes robotic pills can be manufactured for $25 each, sell for hundreds of dollars per unit, and save thousands of dollars in medical costs, making endoscopic procedures palliative. But most importantly, the company believes that PillBots can save serious cases faster than practical by enabling faster and cheaper screening.

The company expects to begin its first clinical trials this year, roll out a clinic in the near future, and launch an at-home version shortly thereafter. And after doctors find delivery products that allow them to look around the body, their next goal is to enable the device to take tissue samples and perform other surgical operations. Their long-term plan is to shrink the robotic drone to the size of a grain of rice and unlock potential beyond the digestive tract. And their goal is to provide all these skills for home care, where doctors control bots through telemedicine.

The future of telemedicine?

I was a little skeptical of the telemedicine angle for such a small robot when we’re talking about a powerful diagnostic tool delivered by mail. Will medical professionals welcome such a change or will they insist that such skills remain in clinics and hospitals? That’s when I saw the press release from Amazon this week announcing that it had acquired the health care provider One Medical for nearly $4 billion and that Amazon wanted to reinvent its health care practice.

Amazon Health SVP Neil Lindsay was quoted in the release as saying: “Making an appointment, waiting weeks or months, taking time off work, driving to the clinic, finding a parking spot, waiting in the waiting room, then a few minutes rushing to the doctor for the often-exam room, and then We take another trip to the pharmacy – we see many opportunities to improve the quality of the experience and allow people to spend valuable time in their day.

In that context, the scientific vision of tiny drones that are swallowed by patients and controlled remotely by doctors during telemedicine visits could become part of our mainstream medical experience. As a lifelong technologist who often writes about the looming dangers of the metaverse, this is one emerging application area that really fascinates me.

Author Bio: Louis Rosenberg, Ph.D He is a pioneer in the field of virtual reality, augmented reality and artificial intelligence. 30 years ago, he developed the first practical mixed reality system in the Air Force Research Laboratory. He then founded the early virtual reality company Immersion Corporation (1993) and the early augmented reality company Outland Research (2004). He is currently the CEO of Unimius AI, a company that leverages the intelligence of human groups. Rosenberg received his PhD from Stanford University, was a professor at California State University and has been awarded more than 300 patents for his work in VR, AR and AI.