Future implantable systems

American physicist and Nobel laureate, Richard Feynman, in his famous lecture from 1959, “There´s plenty of room at the bottom,” presented a wild idea of swallowable surgeons where tiny surgical robots are put inside the blood vessel, travel into the heart, look around, and send the information back to an external controller. These robots can even perform local operations and might be permanently incorporated in the body for continuous monitoring. The idea seems a science fiction dream. In recent years, however, there is major progress on implantable systems that support most of the functionalities of the swallowable surgeons. Nevertheless, these devices remain mostly restricted to research, in part due to limited miniaturization, power supply constraints, and lack of a reliable interface between implants and the external devices.