Soft Medical Robots-Revamping the Diagnostics and Therapeutics Technologies

Abstract

Imagine, a large, benignant, soft and huggable, humanoid robot by your side caring for you, with the know-how of many medical procedures and has a barely evident fiber skeleton yet makes no big deal about it. Does it ring a bell? Well yes, it is Disney's Baymax from Big Hero 6. Such an exceptional human–robot interaction is not just a fiction; it is a likely state of affairs and the current trend. In fact, an inflatable Baymax draws its inspiration from decades-long and current research on soft robotics at Carnegie Mellon University in the healthcare field [1]. Like an magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), which is basically designed for atomic structure studies and later used in medical imaging, the soft robotic actuators are also initially developed outside the clinical research realm and later found their way into the medical device innovations.Soft robotics is the introduction of nonconventional actuating materials with low Young's modulus or deformability, such as polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS), shape memory alloys, shape memory polymer, and electro-active polymers to acquire large‐scale deformation of the whole robotic structures with the vision to impose biomimetic behavior in them [2–5]. The compliance and the elasticity of soft body parts in a robot allow unsupervised reactions with interaction forces and support the bio-inspired locomotion such as morphing, squeezing, flipping, climbing, growing, and crawling that would not be possible with an approach based only on rigid links [4,6–9].As per World Health Organization, medical device innovation refers not only to the invention of new devices but also to adjustments to, or incremental improvements of, existing devices and clinical practices [10]. That is precisely how soft robotic actuators and technologies are contributory in translational research as well as innovation in diagnostics and therapeutics devices. Soft materials, with their compliance, allow conformity and innocuous cooperation with the human body. Therefore, medical practices requiring device–body interaction have a hastily growing bias for this soft-touch campaign. In this editorial, we are discussing the recent soft robotics developments and technologies in designing the medical devices.A host of designs in cardiac devices are focusing on the use of soft actuators in developing devices for functional cardiac support as well as high fidelity heart models for research and training [3,11–15]. A patient-specific compliant direct cardiac compression device developed by Mac Murray and his group use compressed air to inflate elastomer foam chambers and applies compression to the exterior of a heart [11]. This direct cardiac compression is one of its kind as it accounts for the variations in patient-to-patient heart geometry and applies compression without adversely squeezing the coronary arteries. Similar in function, ventricular assistive devices (VAD), means to bridge the gap of transplantation to recovery phase, are also evolving with soft robotics [12–14]. A novel VAD surpasses the need of any triggering mechanism for synchronizing with natural rhythm while augmenting the cardiac function, thanks to its real-time sensing of hemodynamics and automated control [12]. This modular McKibben actuator-based extra-cardial septal bracing incorporates a series of functionalities to promote diastolic function and temporal synchronization with the native heart. An intraventricular balloon pump VAD assistance utilizes the systemic inflation and deflation of a polyurethane membrane to achieve its functionalities [14]. A biorobotic hybrid heart composed of organic endocardial tissues and soft robotic myocardial band has a superior dependability in representing the cardiac motions and endocardial anatomy as compared to the existing in vivo porcine and in-silico heart models devices for intracardiac studies [15].The innovation in surgical devices is having steep transients in its dynamics with the introduction of the soft robot