A Carnegie Mellon University engineer is developing a set of legs that could be incorporated into the swallowable camera-in-a-pill that has become available in the past four years for diagnosing gastrointestinal disorders in the small intestine.

The legs will form a tripod that could stop the capsule’s movement through the intestine, giving doctors a chance to take a closer look, or crawl as if it were an inchworm to give more control to doctors, such as coming back to a suspected lesion.