Heartlander, de robot die kruipt over menselijk hart

Healthcare will definitely benefit from the arise of robotics. Recently some scientists announced ((BBC and New Scientist with demo movie, WARNING!)the development of a robotic caterpillar which can crawl across the surface of the heart to deliver treatment. The robot is just a few centimetres long and is named the HeartLander. It is designed by US researchers (Carnegie Mellon University's Robotics Institute in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania) and tested on pigs. It can move at up to 18 centimetres per minute and can be controlled from wires from outside the body.

There are several advantages of the robot:

• it allows procedures to be carried out without having to stop the heart. This will reduce the risk of illness.
• The patient only needs to have general anaesthetic. This means he may go home the same day.
• It may treat easily damaged tissue of the heart.

In the near future the want to add a camera to the device and a add a radio-frequency probe to treat heart rhythms by killing damaged tissue.

This could theoretically be a vehicle for delivering cell therapies to damaged areas of the heart, so could ultimately be a useful tool, but at the moment we still don't know if such therapies work. A lot more research is needed to determine whether something delivered to the outside surface of the heart can modify activity on the inside - so this is interesting, but currently a long way from practical use in heart therapy. (Professor Peter Weissberg, medical director of the British Heart Foundation)