In the last few years, many examples of blood and medicine delivery drones have been demonstrated worldwide, which mainly rely on aeronautical experience that is not common in the medical world. Speaking about drone delivery, attention should focus on the most important thing: the transported lifesaving good. Traditional boxes that monitor temperature are not usually in real time, and are not suitable for drone transportation because they are heavy and bulky. This means that the biomedical characteristics of delivery are of primary importance. A Smart Capsule, equipped with artificial intelligence (AI), is the first system ever proposed to provide a fully autonomous drone delivery service for perishable and high-value medical products, integrating real-time quality monitoring and control. It consists in a smart casing that is able to guide any autonomous aerial vehicle attached to it, specifically designed for transporting blood, organs, tissues, test samples and drugs, among others. The system monitors the conditions of the product (e.g., temperature, agitation and humidity) and adjusts them when needed by exploiting, for instance, vibrations to maintain the required agitation, ensuring that goods are ready to be used as soon as they are delivered. The Smart Capsule also leverages external temperature to reduce energy uptake from the drone, thus improving the drone’s battery life and flight range. The system replaces the need for specialized drivers and traditional road-bound transportation means, while guaranteeing compliance with all applicable safety regulations. A series of 16 experimental tests was performed to demonstrate the possibility of using the smart capsule to manage the flight and internal good delivery. Eighty-one missions were carried out for a total of 364 min of flight. The Smart Capsule greatly improves emergency response and efficiency of healthcare systems by reducing delivery times by up to 80% and costs by at least 28%. The Smart Capsule and its enabling technology based on AI for drone deliveries are discussed in this paper. The aim of this work is to show the possibility of managing drone delivery with an AI-based device.

Minimally Invasive Surgery (MIS) is one of the main aims of modern medicine. It enables surgery to be performed with a lower number and severity of incisions. Medical robots have been developed worldwide to offer a robotic alternative to traditional medical procedures. New approaches aimed at a substantial decrease of visible scars have been explored, such as Natural Orifice Transluminal Endoscopic Surgery (NOTES). Simple surgical tasks such as the retraction of an organ can be a challenge when performed from narrow access ports. For this reason, there is a continuous need to develop new robotic tools for performing dedicated tasks. This article illustrates the design and testing of a new robotic tool for retraction tasks under vision assistance for NOTES. The retraction robots integrate brushless motors to enable additional degrees of freedom to that provided by magnetic anchoring, thus improving the dexterity of the overall platform. The retraction robot can be easily controlled to reach the target organ and apply a retraction force of up to 1.53 N. Additional degrees of freedom can be used for smooth manipulation and grasping of the organ.

In this paper, we report on the validation of an autonomous drone-based delivery system equipped with a smart capsule for the transportation of blood products in urban areas. The influence of some thermo-mechanical parameters, such as altitude, acceleration/deceleration, external temperature and humidity, on the specimens’ integrity were analyzed. The comparison of the results carried out by hemolytic tests, performed systematically on samples before and after each drone flight, clearly demonstrated that the integrity of blood is preserved and no adverse effects took place during the transport; these results can be addressed to the smart-capsule properties, which allows integrating real-time quality monitoring and control of the temperature experienced by blood products and mechanical vibrations. In addition, we demonstrated this transport system reduces the delivery time considerably. A risk analysis (i.e., HFMEA) was applied to all delivery processes to assess possible criticalities. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time a drone-based delivery system of blood products in an urban area has been validated to be employed in a future clinical scenario.

In this paper a simple but effective measuring system for endoluminal procedures is presented. The device allows measuring forces during the endoluminal manipulation of tissues with a standard surgical instrument for laparoscopic procedures. The force measurement is performed by recording both the forces applied directly by the surgeon at the instrument handle and the reaction forces on the access port. The measuring system was used to measure the forces necessary for appropriate surgical manipulation of tissues during transanal endoscopic microsurgery (TEM). Ex-vivo and in-vivo measurements were performed, reported and discussed. The obtained data can be used for developing and appropriately dimensioning novel dedicated instrumentation for TEM procedures.

Wireless capsule endoscopic devices are adopted for painless diagnosis of cancer and other diseases affecting the gastrointestinal tract as an alternative to traditional endoscopy. Although much work has been done to improve capsule performance in terms of active navigation, a major drawback is the limited available energy on board the capsule, usually provided by a battery. Another key shortcoming of active capsules is their limitation in terms of active functionalities and related costs. An inductive-based wireless recharging system for the development of an innovative capsule for colonoscopy is proposed in this paper; the aim is to provide fast off-line battery recovery for improving capsule lifecycle and thus reducing the cost of a single endoscopic procedure. The wireless recharging system has been properly designed to fit the dimensions of a capsule for colonoscopy but it can be applied to any biomedical devices to increase the number of times it can be used after proper sterilization. The current system is able to provide about 1 W power and is able to recharge the battery capsule in 20 min which is a reasonable time considering capsule operation time (10–15 min).

The compliance and deformability of soft robotics allow human–machine interactions in a safe manner without the need of sophisticated control systems inherent in rigid-body robotic devices. However, these advantages introduce controllability and predictability challenges. In this study, we propose a novel fluidic-driven variable stiffness revolute joint (VSRJ) based on hybrid soft-rigid approach to achieve adjustable compliance while addressing the abovementioned challenges. The VSRJ is composed of a silicone rubber cylinder as a pressure chamber and two identical rigid links. The soft cylinder is positioned in a fully closed compartment created by the assembly of the two rigid links, thus constraining its expansion when pressure is applied. By applying pressure, the stiffness of the joint increases accordingly for the following reasons: (1) increasing the friction force between the cylinder and the compartment walls and (2) creating a locking mechanism through the expansion of the cylinder into space between rigid links in a “bump” formation. Experimental results show that the VSRJ can achieve up to 8-fold rotational stiffness enhancement from 0 to 5 bar input pressure within −30° to +30° rotation angle. The modular design of the rigid link allows the assembly of multiple VSRJs to build a variable stiffness structure in which each VSRJ has an independent stiffness and relative position. The VSRJ was characterized in terms of repeatability, torque, and stiffness. The experimental results were validated by finite element analysis. This approach can provide opportunities for the use of this new variable stiffness concept as an efficient alternative to traditional variable-stiffness linkages.