One of the reasons the medical industry
is interested in origami is to create
devices that are smaller. They wanted a
new concept not just a smaller device
but a new way to think about the devices.
Origami is often useful in medicine for
much the same reason that it's useful in
space. If you have something that is flat
and sheet-like but you want to get into the
body, you want it to go in through as small
hole as possible.
Doctors are always looking for some kind
of way to be less invasive or to be more
precise. Or perhaps to do surgeries that
require more precision maybe working
with nerves or something that is very
small.
BYU has recently entered into an
agreement with Intuitive Surgical
Incorporated to license patents on
devices that have been developed in our
lab. Intuitive Surgical is a company that
makes the DaVinci robot that does surgeries
robotically. Here we can see one of their
current devices that used to grasp things
or to hold a needle to do suturing.
The initial inspiration for the grasping
device we worked on was an origami pattern
the people commonly called "chompers."
Here is a large scale prototype that was
based on some origami ideas of reducing the part count.
So you can see that here we just
have this 3-D printed plastic and
here we've actually moved to 3-D printed in stainless steel and we're
able to make parts at this 4 millimeter scale.
3-D printing allows us to experiment with
a shape or prototype very quickly. I can have
an idea from the computer to the 3-D
printer into our lab for a look in less
than a day. We have about a third or
fourth of the number of parts of a
current device, so many fewer parts. And
the parts we have, the complexity of the
parts is lower. Our big idea is that we
can make things smaller and smaller by
using inspiration of things like origami
that are very simple. So instead of trying
to make their complexity smaller and
smaller, we're going for simplicity early.
These new devices that we've created to
enable robotic surgery at smaller scales
to be less invasive, we really feel like
going to make a big difference
