Partner @ The Mullings Group, Board Member, "24 in '24 Top Voices in Med Tech (MD+DI)", Host of The Bleeding Edge of Digital Health Podcast
Motorized, ingestable, robots that are maneuvered remotely inside the stomach by a physician, to safely and effectively perform the equivalent of an esophagogastroduodenoscopy (EGD), AKA an upper endoscopy....all from the comforts of your home. Sounds very sci-fiesque...like it would be possible far off in the distant future, if ever, right? Not really. Torrey Smith & Christopher Green, and their team of brilliant engineers at Endiatx are much closer to making this a reality than you might think. The clip below shows this impressive tech in action. Their first product, PillBot™, has a light and a camera at one end of the device, reminiscent of a traditional endoscope. The other end of device is where it gets interesting. They have placed small motorized propellers inside tiny little lumens, which allow the device to squirt fluid in many different directions, thereby making the device steerable from anywhere in the world via an Xbox controller. In my recent sit with them for episode 36 of The Bleeding Edge of Digital Health Podcast, they talk about what future iterations might look like. Eventually, they hope to incorporate micro surgical instruments (scissors, graspers, scalpel, etc) into their devices. Perhaps, one day the form factor will be small enough (think of a grain of rice!) to cross the blood-brain barrier, enabling remote, minimally invasive brain tumor surgery. The possibilities are endless, and fun to think about. This episode is up live for viewing on all the major podcast directories, and also on my YouTube channel (links in comments.) Thank you again Torrey & Chris for joining me on the show, and showing us what the future of healthcare really looks like! Derek Underwood Alex Luebke James Erd Maxwell Robinson Heather Gallagher Natty Leprêtre Dianthe (Harris) Skurko Kevin Johnson Seth Warhaftig Allan Rodgers Wyatt Romero Thomas M Gallagher Quentin C. Sean Talley Nicole Hahn Evan Yip Cameron Wilkes Tylar Banta Kaelyn Luebke Md. Sojib Mondol #robot #robots #robotics #roboticsurgery #digitalsurgery #digitalhealth #medtech #endoscopy #EGD #medicaldevice #medicaldevices