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Grain-sized soft robot delivers multiple medications, guided by magnetic fields


If you're ever faced with trying to pick up a grain of rice with a pair of chopsticks, spare a thought for the scientists behind this latest innovation, which has been called "a medical breakthrough on the verge of happening." They've painstakingly built a soft robot with the capacity to carry…

"In this work, we have proposed a millimeter-scale soft robot, which can be actuated by alternating magnetic fields to dispense four types of drugs with reprogrammable drug-dispensing sequence and dosage," MAE lead investigator, Assistant Professor Lum Guo Zhan, told New Atlas. Lum, who has been working on small-scale robots for 11 years, also believes that this new technology has the potential to change the face of invasive medical procedures and provide more targeted and effective treatment. What's more, the engineers were able to manipulate the device to slowly release a drug over eight hours, and they believe the robot has the potential to offer both immediate and sustained medication delivery, tailored to the patient's needs.

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