Mary Bowerman

USA TODAY Network

The days of waiting for a swallowed item to pass through the body may soon be gone, thanks to a tiny pill-size origami robot.

Massachusetts Institute of Technology researchers recently developed a tiny robot that can unfold itself from a biodegradable capsule once ingested, and then crawl across the stomach to remove swallowed items like button batteries.

Each year 3,500 button cell batteries are swallowed, according to the National Capital Poison Center. While they typically pass through the body without incident, if they come into prolonged contact with the stomach or esophagus they can cause internal burning, according to an MIT statement.

Daniela Rus, a professor in MIT’s Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, who helped create the robot, said it became increasingly clear that there should be a better way to remove a button battery non-invasively.

“[A researcher] bought a piece of ham, and he put the battery on the ham,” Rus said in a statement. “Within half an hour, the battery was fully submerged in the ham. So that made me realize that, yes, this is important. If you have a battery in your body, you really want it out as soon as possible.”

The new robot builds advances a model that was introduced last year, according to MIT.

The team of researchers, who hailed from MIT, the University of Sheffield, and the Tokyo Institute of Technology, used simulations of the human esophagus and stomach to show that the tiny robots can be “steered by external magnetic fields,” without the use of a tether, according to a statement from MIT.

“It’s really exciting to see our small origami robots doing something with potential important applications to health care,” Rus said. “For applications inside the body, we need a small, controllable, untethered robot system."

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