Soft robotic actuators, which are pneumatic artificial muscles designed and programmed to perform lifelike motions, have recently emerged as an attractive alternative to more rigid components that have conventionally been used in biomedical devices. In fact, earlier this year, a Boston Children’s Hospital team revealed a proof-of-concept soft robotic sleeve that could support the function of a failing heart.

Despite this promising innovation, the team recognized that many pediatric heart patients have more one-sided congenital heart conditions. These patients are not experiencing failure of the entire heart — instead, congenital conditions have caused disease in either the heart’s right or left ventricle, but not both.

“We set out to develop new technology that would help one diseased ventricle, when the patient is in isolated left or right heart failure, pull blood into the chamber and then effectively pump it into the circulatory system,” says Nikolay Vasilyev, MD, a researcher in cardiac surgery at Boston Children’s.

Now, Vasilyev and his collaborators — researchers from Boston Children’s, the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences and the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University — have revealed their soft robotic solution. They describe their system in a paper published online in Science Robotics today. …