Tiny Robots Are Driving Innovations In Healthcare Tech, From Pacemakers To Cancer Treatment

Tiny robots have become increasingly popular in the robotics sector, particularly over the last few weeks.

Recently, engineers from the University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley) revealed the world’s smallest wireless flying robot that’s powered and controlled by magnets. Such robots could be used for artificial pollination or for inspecting small spaces.

Of course, tiny robots aren’t a new concept. A while ago, researchers from Beihang University in Beijing, China, created the smallest, lightest solar-powered drone—just one of the many innovations the sector has produced over the past few years.

Yet, each development is a big leap, taking us closer to making even tinier, better, and more effective tiny robots that can be used for a wide range of purposes—including healthcare.

This is where a new tiny robot developed by engineers from Northwestern University comes in.

The team has developed a tiny pacemaker that’s smaller than a rice grain! Moreover, the pacemaker can be fit inside the tip of a syringe, allowing it to be non-invasively injected into the body.


The pacemaker comes with a small, soft, flexible, wireless, wearable device that sits atop a patient’s chest to control pacing. This device shines a light pulse to activate the pacemaker when the device detects an irregular heartbeat. These short pulses control the pacing and can penetrate through skin, bone, and muscles.

It’s powered by a galvanic cell—a battery that converts chemical energy into electrical energy. It uses two different metals as electrodes that form a battery when in contact with surrounding biofluids, enabling the chemical reactions that enable it to deliver electric pulses to the heart.

The pacemaker is designed for patients that require temporary pacing, which is why it’s biocompatible—it naturally dissolves into bodily fluids, cutting out the need for surgical extraction.

“There’s a crucial need for temporary pacemakers in the context of pediatric heart surgeries, and that’s a use case where size miniaturization is incredibly important. In terms of the device load on the body—the smaller, the better,” said Northwestern bioelectronics pioneer John A. Rogers, who led the device development.

While the device can work with hearts of all sizes, it’s particularly well-suited for newborn babies with congenital heart defects.

“About 1% of children are born with congenital heart defects—regardless of whether they live in a low-resource or high-resource country,” said Igor Efimov, Northwestern experimental cardiologist and co-lead of the study. “The good news is that these children only need temporary pacing after a surgery. In about seven days or so, most patients’ hearts will self-repair. But those seven days are absolutely critical.”

The study, which was published in the journal Nature, builds on a previous design by the team back in 2021, in which they created the first dissolvable device for temporary pacing—a move that could help patients requiring temporary pacemakers to avoid invasive surgery and its complications.

Currently, surgeons sew electrodes onto the heart muscle during surgery, with wires protruding from a patient’s chest. These wires connect to an external pacing box that controls the heart’s rhythm. When the pacemaker’s job is done, the electrodes are removed, giving rise to potential complications, such as infection, dislodgement, torn or damaged tissues, bleeding, and blood clots.


Ahead of this, engineers, scientists, and clinicians from the University of Leeds, the University of Glasgow, and the University of Edinburgh collaborated to build a tiny magnetic robot capable of generating high-resolution 3D ultrasound images of the gastrointestinal tract, or gut, and other sections deep within the body.

These probes could revolutionize early cancer detection, including colorectal cancer.

Postgraduate researcher Nikita Greenidge, a member of Leeds’ STORM Lab and lead author of the paper, said, “By combining our advanced robotics with medical ultrasound imaging, we take this innovation one step ahead of traditional colonoscopy, allowing doctors to diagnose and treat in a single procedure—eliminating the wait between diagnosis and intervention.”

This was made possible by using a not-so-popular 3D shape—the oloid—which enables the medical robot a previously impossible range of motion—the roll—which is essential for precise navigation and imaging inside the body. The robot is also equipped with a small, high-frequency imaging device to capture detailed 3D images of internal tissues.

Pietro Valdastri, Professor and Chair in Robotics and Autonomous Systems and Director of Leeds’ STORM Lab, who also coordinated the research behind this paper, said: “For the first time, this research enables us to reconstruct a 3D ultrasound image taken from a probe deep inside the gut—something that has never been done before.”

Do you think tiny robots could revolutionize the healthcare industry?

Let us know in the comments below!