A soft robotic sleeve which mimics healthy cardiac muscles could inject new life into failing hearts.
With the scarcity of available donor hearts clinicians and biomedical engineers from Boston Children's Hospital and Harvard University have spent several years developing a mechanical alternative.
Frank Pigula, MD, who took part in the research at Boston Children's Hospital's Heart Center, and his collaborators have designed a device that attaches to and snugly hugs the outside of the heart without having any contact with blood. The soft robotic sleeve mimics the heart's natural compression motion using only non-rigid, biocompatible materials.
Their tests — done in pig hearts given their similar size and structure to human hearts — show that the device restores acutely failing hearts to 97% of their original cardiac output.
"This work represents an exciting proof-of-concept result for this soft robot, demonstrating that it can safely interact with soft tissue and lead to improvements in cardiac function," says Conor Walsh, PhD, the John L. Loeb Associate Professor of Engineering and Applied Sciences at Harvard SEAS and a Core Faculty Member at the Wyss Institute. Walsh, a soft robotics expert, co-led the study with Pigula.
The soft robotic heart sleeve also contains sophisticated sensing abilities that measure pressure at specific points on the heart's surface.