Artificial Pumping Hearts: What They Mean For Soft Robots (And Humans)

screenrant.com:

Soft robotics is the field of developing flexible machines that often stretch the idea of what a robot can be, and independent teams have been making advances using soft robotic principles in creating artificial hearts and heart-like pumps. Artificial organs have long been challenging to make due to the complexity of replicating biological functions mechanically. Demand has only risen, both for human use and also for use in new robotic systems.

Robots used to help heal have been developed for some time. Conceptually, the heart is a type of pump and humans have been building pumps for millennia. Practically, however, the heart is different from other mechanical pumps because it works via deformation, contracting and relaxing muscles cyclicly to push blood in bursts, which gives humans a pulse. A pump like this can't be built using conventional robotics parts and materials, as most metals and plastics aren't designed to flex constantly like heart tissue, so fully artificial beating hearts have not been practical yet. Some partial heart implants have worked around this by not replicating a heartbeat at all and instead using a constant flow with a flow rate control system, and patients with these models of implant don't have a pulse as a result.

Related: The Way This BirdBot Robot Walks Is Amazing

In January 2020, The Mirror reported a team including Dutch surgeon Professor Jolanda Kluin working with the British Heart Foundation plans to design a soft robotic artificial heart using flexible synthetic muscles, with animal testing to begin by 2025 and human use planned by 2028. Using these soft robotics to help humans would prevent the deaths of many patients who die waiting for compatible donors and hopefully eliminate the