Deans' stroke musings: Soft robotic sleeve supports heart function

Changing stroke rehab and research worldwide now.Time is Brain! trillions and trillions of neurons that DIE each day because there are NO effective hyperacute therapies besides tPA(only 12% effective). I have 523 posts on hyperacute therapy, enough for researchers to spend decades proving them out. These are my personal ideas and blog on stroke rehabilitation and stroke research. Do not attempt any of these without checking with your medical provider. Unless you join me in agitating, when you need these therapies they won't be there.

What this blog is for:

My blog is not to help survivors recover, it is to have the 10 million yearly stroke survivors light fires underneath their doctors, stroke hospitals and stroke researchers to get stroke solved. 100% recovery. The stroke medical world is completely failing at that goal, they don't even have it as a goal. Shortly after getting out of the hospital and getting NO information on the process or protocols of stroke rehabilitation and recovery I started searching on the internet and found that no other survivor received useful information. This is an attempt to cover all stroke rehabilitation information that should be readily available to survivors so they can talk with informed knowledge to their medical staff. It lays out what needs to be done to get stroke survivors closer to 100% recovery. It's quite disgusting that this information is not available from every stroke association and doctors group.

Wednesday, January 18, 2017

Soft robotic sleeve supports heart function

Maybe you want to talk to your doctor about this if you have atrial fibrillation, less chance of blood pooling. But since I'm not medically trained this advice is worthless.
http://stm.sciencemag.org/content/9/373/eaaf3925?utm_campaign=toc_stm_2017-01-18&et_rid=33952789&et_cid=1112490

Ellen T. Roche¹,²,³,
Markus A. Horvath¹,²,⁴,*,
Isaac Wamala⁵,*,
Ali Alazmani¹,²,⁵,⁶,
Sang-Eun Song¹,²,⁷,
William Whyte¹,²,⁸,
Zurab Machaidze⁵,
Christopher J. Payne¹,²,
James C. Weaver²,
Gregory Fishbein⁹,
Joseph Kuebler¹⁰,
Nikolay V. Vasilyev⁵,
David J. Mooney¹,²,
Frank A. Pigula⁵,¹¹,† and
Conor J. Walsh¹,²,†

+ Author Affiliations

↵†Corresponding author. Email: walsh@seas.harvard.edu (C.J.W.); frank.pigula@ulp.org (F.A.P.)

↵* Joint second authors.

Science Translational Medicine 18 Jan 2017:
Vol. 9, Issue 373,
DOI: 10.1126/scitranslmed.aaf3925

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Robots have a change of heart

Ventricular assist devices help failing hearts function by pumping blood but require monitoring and anticoagulant therapy to prevent blood clot formation. Roche et al. created a soft robotic device with material properties similar to those of native heart tissue that sits snugly around the heart and provides ventricular assistance without ever contacting blood. The robotic sleeve uses compressed air to power artificial silicone muscles that compress and twist, mimicking the movements of the normal human heart. The authors show that the artificial muscles could be selectively activated to twist, compress, or simultaneously perform both actions on one side or both sides of the heart. The device increased cardiac ejection volume in vitro and when implanted in adult pigs during drug-induced cardiac arrest.

Abstract

There is much interest in form-fitting, low-modulus, implantable devices or soft robots that can mimic or assist in complex biological functions such as the contraction of heart muscle. We present a soft robotic sleeve that is implanted around the heart and actively compresses and twists to act as a cardiac ventricular assist device. The sleeve does not contact blood, obviating the need for anticoagulation therapy or blood thinners, and reduces complications with current ventricular assist devices, such as clotting and infection. Our approach used a biologically inspired design to orient individual contracting elements or actuators in a layered helical and circumferential fashion, mimicking the orientation of the outer two muscle layers of the mammalian heart. The resulting implantable soft robot mimicked the form and function of the native heart, with a stiffness value of the same order of magnitude as that of the heart tissue. We demonstrated feasibility of this soft sleeve device for supporting heart function in a porcine model of acute heart failure. The soft robotic sleeve can be customized to patient-specific needs and may have the potential to act as a bridge to transplant for patients with heart failure.