Millerbots Research (Titanium Bone Foam)
Our team researched the cutting-edge world of Biomedical Engineering to find out how surgeons repair badly broken bones. At the very beginning of this Robotics season, our team voted to research the topic having to do with the skeletal system. One of our earliest research searches led us to bone foam. We will tell you more about that in a moment. We also voted to write a song about our research.
The problem we identified is “How do surgeons repair badly broken bones?” We know that biomedical engineering goes back to ancient times. Archeologists in Egypt found a mummy with an artificial toe that is 3,000 years old. We also know that amputation (cutting and removing of a human appendage) was a widely used practice.
To find out what doctors are currently doing to repair badly broken bones, we read books, scoured the Internet, and met with graduates students from the University of Michigan Biomedical Engineering department David Lai and Dana Begun. We gathered a lot of information.
Videos:
Bill Nye “Bones”
Skeleton. Directed by David Hutt. Eyewitness, 1994.
The Incredible Human Body. Directed by Karen Goodman and Kirk Simon. National Geographic, 2002.
Books:
Colombo, Luann. Uncover the Human Body. Bellevue Publishers Group, 2002.
Cox, Alexander. Body Science. New York: Ling, 2009.
Ganeri, Anita. Body Basics: Bones. New York: ___, 2009.
Lindsay, Mary. The Visual Dictionary of the Human Body. New York: Kindersley, 1991.
Simon, Seymour. Bones: Our Skeletal System. New York: HarperCollins, 2000.
We Learned about Bones
General:
- Bones function to move, support, and protect all of the organs in the body.
- Organs found on bones are marrow, endosteum, periosteum, nerves, blood vessels, and cartilage.
- Bones contain fibers.
- The largest bone in the body is the thigh bone, called the femur.
- Calcification is the process by which calcium helps to strengthen bones.
Strength:
Bones are a compound material; the solid is calcium and the gel is collagen, which makes bones strong and lightweight. Bone strength is from vitamin D, calcium, and the physical activity you do.
To make bones strong, a person needs to have vitamin C, vitamin D, and physical activity. If you don’t have these things, your bones are not going to be very strong.
Osteoporosis. Osteoporosis is caused by poor bone density and can trigger disabilities caused by severely weakened bones like compression fractures of the spine and hip fractures. Some treatments you can get to resolve or lessen the impact of osteoporosis are parathyroid hormone, calcitonin, and taloxifene. There are no early symptoms that you can identify for osteoporosis.
Types of Breaks
There are four main types of bone breaks: displaced, nondisplaced, open, and closed. In a displaced bone break, the bones break into more than two pieces. In a nondisplaced break, the bone breaks all the way through or cracks either part of the bone, but it does not move and it maintains its alignment. In an open break, the bone comes through the skin. In a closed break, the bone stays inside the skin.
We learned about titanium bone foam and other ways doctors are currently repairing badly broken bones.
Bone Foam: What Is It?
Germany’s Fraunhofer Research Group made a bone-replacing material called resabone, then they made something better called titanium foam (bone foam). Bone foam is like a metal sponge. Recent bone foam was invented by Afsaneh Rabiei of North Carolina State University. Bone foam is the bones’ “favorite” kind of replacement.
Titanium bone foam helps bodies heal after traumatic injuries and bone breaks.
Other Ways Doctors Fix Bones
There are many ways a doctor can heal a broken bone. One way is a cast. A cast keeps the bones held together until the bone heals itself.
We also researched nanorobotics. Nanorobotics is an emerging field that deals with the controlled manipulation of objects with nanometer scale dimensions.
Then we devised this new adaptation of bone foam delivery with nanorobots. Our innovative solution is:
The use of nanobots to deliver titanium bone foam to patients with traumatic bone breaks.
The nanobots, loaded with molecules of titanium bone foam, would be injected by a shot and travel through the bloodstream to complete their job. Then, the nanobots would travel to the capillaries in the small intestine, where the bad marrow and nanobots would “get in line” to be excreted.
These nanobots, themselves, are not expensive to make; they are simply small pieces of metal guided through the body by magnetic fields controlled by doctors.
Nanobot bone marrow repair is preferred over today’s surgery methods because it’s less painful, leaves no scars, less chance of infection or death, and chemotherapy kills cells all over the body – not just cancer cells. Nanobots are BETTER!
In addition to this solution, we sang the song that you just heard to the students at our school, to children at our local library, and people at the Walton Woods retirement community. There, people pledged to eat at least ten calcium-rich foods or drinks during the next week. Eating calcium-rich foods makes bones stronger, and strong bones are less likely to break.
<I eat good food because I want strong bones
But if they break
How to they make new bones?
Nanobots are shot with new bone foam
I’ll keep my real bones
I’ll take my Flintstones>
Re: NXT move vs motor block help needed 
