Ingestible Robots Could Help Save Kids Who Swallow Batteries

Two-year-old Briana Florer loved Frozen and Minnie Mouse. She was just beginning to talk. But three days after Christmas she died after swallowing a silver button battery, Good Housekeeping reported. Her doctors believed the battery ate through her esophagus and carotid artery. Every year, more than 3,500 people in the United States swallow button batteries. Between 2005 and 2014, doctors reported 11,940 cases of children under the age of 6 who ingested a battery.

Swallowed batteries don’t cause harm if they are digested normally. But if they become lodged in the tissue of the stomach or esophagus, they can cause an electric current that produces hydroxide, a chemical that burns and damages tissue. Chemical burns can happen within as little as two hours of battery ingestion, and surgeons often can’t remove a battery quickly enough to prevent harm.

But now researchers at MIT have developed a tiny origami robot that can unfold itself from a swallowed capsule, crawl across the stomach wall, and remove an embedded button battery or patch a wound, making surgery unnecessary. The researchers made the rectangular robot by sandwiching a piece of Biolefin, a biodegradable material that shrinks when heated, between two layers of dried pig intestine like that used in sausage casings...