Chapter 25 – Tiny Medicine

Medical change is coming. Robots and tiny machines built using nanoscale materials are going to fundamentally change engineering at the microscale and medicine will be the first area to benefit. In tiny machine design, copper and iron are replaced with carbon nanotube superfiber wire and magnetic nanocomposite materials. Because of the small size of tiny machines, high magnetic fields can be generated and high-force, high-speed devices can be built. Tiny machines are still in the early stages of being built and this chapter describes their engineering design and the work underway to build them. The tiny machines will operate inside the body and detect disease at an early stage, then provide precise therapy or surgery. There will also be engineering applications for the tiny machines such as performing high-throughput manufacturing operations at the microscale. The design principles and materials processing techniques described herein will facilitate the development of nanomaterial robots and tiny machines for myriad applications ranging from miniaturized sensors, actuators, energy harvesting devices, high-performance electric motors, and energy storage devices to smart structures with built-in artificial responsive behavior.