This is the latest it seems -Now a consortium of European researchers is testing a way to connect several swallowable devices to create a surgical “robot” that would self-assemble inside the stomach.[...]A collaboration of researchers from Italy, France, Switzerland, and Spain, called ARES, is testing a way for multiple capsules to automatically snap together. Each would be swallowed individually before assembling into a more complex device once safely in the stomach.Pretty smooth I should say, although for some reason it reminds me of some gross scifi movie (forget which one, pretty sure it was a blockbuster) where some alien lifeform would get into the body of a space traveler, and will burst open through the stomach of our spacewalker in a highly nauseous, gross, nightmarish scene.  Just imagine - “doctor, there is something gnawing inside my small intestine” “Oh, it must be the robot performing daily ablutions”.That aside, I am not sure I will be too happy about having robots handling me.  I would much rather have a human being prodding my innards, human error and all including.  But, who cares about my preference anyway?  Robotic surgery - the type where robots perform the surgery from OUTSIDE the patient, not INSIDE as the earlier reference describes - is perhaps almost in the horizon.Posted in Biomed, Science Tagged: cure, diagnosis, medicine, robot, surgery, video