One of the best things about a human life is how you can always make it better in one capacity or the other. This, as you can guess, helps us a lot with hitting upon some huge milestones along the way. Now, while each of these milestones has shown to add a different value to our lives, none have done the job quite like technology. Technology’s emergence was outright anomalous from the get-go for reasons that were notably bigger than just its ingenious skill-set. You see, they also revolved a great deal around the manner it used those skills to impact an entire spectrum, including a highly-critical sector like healthcare. We can even argue that technology’s foray into healthcare couldn’t have come at a better time, considering how badly the sector was struggling against its obsolete structure. Nevertheless, despite realizing a completely new identity, the famous medtech linkup will continue to scale up the healthcare picture on a rather consistent basis. In fact, this exact pattern was put on full display by a recent development.
The researching team at University of Pennsylvania has successfully developed a technique, which employs magnetic microrobots to brush and floss teeth. According to certain reports, the technique uses a magnetic field to manipulate the microrobots into becoming bristle-like structures that can sweep away dental plague from the broad surface of teeth. Apart from it, they can also, interestingly enough, morph into these elongated strings that can prove helpful in flossing. Regardless of the application, however, the microrobots have showed a reliable ability to produce catalytic reaction, which is an important element for killing any harmful bacteria present within the mouth. If all goes well, the technique should become an extremely valuable tool for people who happen to lack the dexterity that an effective cleanup usually requires.
“Routine oral care is cumbersome and can pose challenges for many people, especially those who have hard time cleaning their teeth” said Hyun (Michel) Koo, one of the creators of the new robots. “You have to brush your teeth, then floss your teeth, then rinse your mouth; it’s a manual, multi-step process. The big innovation here is that the robotics system can do all three in a single, hands-free, automated way.”
So far, the researchers have tested the new technology by getting it to remove biofilms from 3D printed replicas of human teeth, as well as real teeth mounted in a rig, and as per the available details, they did observe promising results.
