In April last year, senior researchers at the Italian Institute of Technology, including Mario Caroni, announced in the journal Advanced Materials that they had developed the world's first rechargeable and entirely edible battery. They stated that edible electronic devices would have a significant impact on monitoring and treating gastrointestinal issues, as well as on food quality control.
The edible electronics hold promise to revolutionize healthcare and emergency response. Image Source: Italian Institute of Technology
This team isn't going it alone. According to recent reports from the Physics Organization Network, Dario Floreano, Director of the Laboratory of Intelligent Systems at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, is currently leading a bold research project: creating edible robots and digestible electronic products.
Floreano points out that, unbelievable as it may seem, combining food science and robotics could have a significant impact on fields like healthcare and environmental protection.
Breaking Boundaries between Food and Robotics
Floreano explains that the idea of combining food and robots originated from a comment by postdoctoral researcher Shin Hsu in 2017. Hsu noted that the main difference between robots and biological systems is that robots cannot be eaten by other organisms. This got Floreano thinking about how to break the boundaries between food and robots.
To tackle this, he led a project called "ROBOFOOD". The project aims to replace hard, cold electronic components with edible parts, breaking the boundaries of robotics research by creating edible robots and robot-like food. The project spans four years and is scheduled to continue until September 2025, with team members from Switzerland, Italy, the Netherlands, and the UK.
The "ROBOFOOD" team has partnered with scientists from Wageningen University in the Netherlands to develop a drone whose wings are made of a mixture of edible oil and chocolate rice cakes.
Floreano notes that they have developed the world's first drone with 50% edible parts. This drone can be used for emergency search and rescue operations, not only to locate missing persons or animals but also to transport essential food or medicine. Moreover, the drone itself is edible, with its edible parts meeting the food standards required during emergencies as proposed by the United Nations.
Of course, the current challenge for this drone is the need for sufficiently robust edible materials to make the wings, capable of withstanding wind, rain, and high temperatures.
Aiding Real-Time Diagnosis in Healthcare
The project team is pushing further, extending this concept to the healthcare domain. They have collaborated with Professor Jonathan Rossiter, an expert in robotics at the University of Bristol in the UK, to develop a digestible sensor that can assist in treating or monitoring intestinal diseases.
While swallowable devices, such as pills containing cameras or digital systems, are already used in healthcare, these devices currently contain indigestible components that need to be retrieved after use. In contrast to these gastrointestinal devices, the new sensor does not need to be excreted or retrieved from the patient's body. The ease of digestion also eliminates the risk of material residue remaining in the body.
Image Source: Visual China
According to a research team, although further testing and development are needed, the sensor demonstrates the feasibility of manufacturing digestible electronic components.
As reported on the official website of West Lake University, Professor Jiang Hanqing from the School of Engineering has utilized edible materials with electronic properties found in daily life, such as seaweed, cheese, and edible gold and silver leaf, to create edible supercapacitors. The research team states that such supercapacitors are not only edible but also digestible, and can be used to power small devices for detecting physiological states inside the human body, thus avoiding the pain and discomfort caused by invasive examinations for patients.
The Jiang Hanqing team believes that if more electronic devices like these can be implanted or introduced into the human body in appropriate ways, future real-time diagnostic electronic instruments will have significant potential, expanding human understanding of themselves indefinitely.
Reducing Electronic Waste to Protect the Environment
The research team also states that besides the healthcare monitoring field, the "Machine Food" project will also make significant contributions to environmental protection. Materials and processes that are easily decomposable or even digestible, contribute to addressing the growing problem of electronic waste worldwide.
In particular, the issue of spent batteries is highlighted. It is estimated that in the United States alone, 3 billion batteries are discarded each year. Most of these batteries eventually end up in landfills, where toxic substances leak into the environment.
Mario, the head of the "Machine Food" team, led the development of the world's first edible rechargeable battery, with nearly all components being edible. Specifically, the battery's anode and cathode consist of riboflavin (Vitamin B2) and quercetin, respectively, the electrolyte is water-based, and the separator (the permeable membrane between the anode and cathode, preventing short circuits) is made from seaweed.
Researchers state that once fully charged, this 0.65-volt battery can provide 48 microamps of current in just 12 minutes. While it may sound modest, it's sufficient to power small electronic devices like low-power LEDs. Connor Boland, a battery technology development physicist at the University of Sussex, notes that this research demonstrates the feasibility of rechargeable batteries being made entirely from edible materials.
In another breakthrough, the "Machine Food" team has developed an edible actuator that converts energy into mechanical force to assist robots in functioning. In other words, when a robot equipped with this actuator is ingested by a person, the actuator will enable the robot to perform useful tasks. This marks a significant step for the research team towards achieving fully functional and edible robots.
