Science Ahoy!

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 (?) gets into the body of a space traveler, and bursts open 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.