Researchers Deploy Motion Tracking to 3D Printer to Allow for Printing of Sensors Onto Organs
18-03-2021 | By Robin Mitchell
Researchers have recently combined motion tracking technology with a 3D printer to create a printer then print onto moving body parts. What advantages do printable sensors provide, what challenges do they face, and what have the researchers achieved?
Advantages of Printable Sensors
When it comes to the medical field, having sensors hooked up to a patient is often essential. Sensory data gathered from patients can provide medical staff with information on their current status, predictions on how their health will be in the short term, and provide data for studies in the long term to improve diagnostics.
However, current sensors are large, bulky, rigid, and often very uncomfortable, making them difficult to use with even the timidest patients. Those with dementia will often pull off wires and devices that they do not recognise in fear, and can lead to extreme monitoring difficulties. Furthermore, the human body is organic, and as such can flex, stretch, and move. This makes attaching sensors difficult as adhesives and straps can either cause stress damage to sensors, or cause them to fall off.
Printable electronics is an area of study concerned with electronics that can be printed using liquid-like mediums. While not all printed electronics are flexible, many aim to be as this allows them to be printed onto all kinds of flexible medium.
Demonstrations of flexible sensors already show that they can function well on human skin and other flexible surfaces, but other challenges still exist such as ease of application. Furthermore, drawing sensors using pen-like tools can be challenging with patients who do not stay calm. Applying such sensors using printer technology poses challenges as patients breathe (which induces movement and stretching in the skin).
Researchers Demonstrate Motion Tracking 3D Printer
Recognising the challenges faced with printed electronics onto moving organic surfaces, researchers from the University of Minnesota have combined motion tracking with a 3D printer. The idea behind the development is that surfaces that will move can be tracked using the same technology used in Hollywood film productions. This can then be fed into a 3D printer that can adjust its relative position in real-time.
While the concept of combining motion tracking and 3D printing had already been discovered by the team two years prior, the latest development has significantly improved the motion-tracking. It allows for a greater degree of motion. The researchers demonstrated this by moving their hand in both the X and Y plane while also rotating the hand. Furthermore, the motion tracking system's improvements allow for mapping organs that expand and contract (such as lungs), allowing for printing onto surfaces like the chests.
Initially, the team experimented with a balloon surface to see how the motion tracking software would interpret expansion and contraction. Afterwards, an animal lung had a hydrogel-based sensor printed onto it which was artificially inflated and deflated.
How will this technology help the medical field?
The use of motion tracking with a 3D printer to print sensors onto organic tissue has far greater applications. The first, and most important, is the use of motion tracking with surgical robots. Robotic systems operate extremely well in scenarios where the object under work is either static relative to the robot, or its motion is controlled numerically (such as a conveyor belt). However, the human body moves in unpredictable ways, and as such a robotic system would need to track organs and tissue as it is worked on. Therefore, a motion tracking system built into a surgical robotic system would essentially create a relative origin that matches the motion changes from the human body and internal organs.
Motion-tracking technology with 3D printed sensors may also be beneficial to COVID and other respiratory infections. Such infections require the monitoring of the lungs. The use of 3D printed sensors could allow medical staff to monitor breathing externally (i.e. on the chest), or monitor the lungs themselves (internally). Internal printed sensors would allow doctors to closely monitor the lungs' condition and take precautions if degradation or complications arise.
Such technology is still very far away, and printing sensors onto organs have many challenges, such as biocompatibility and interference. However, motion tracking with 3D printing technology already demonstrates how robotic systems of the future will negate patient movement.
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