White paper on requirements and constraints of combining technologies

Every year worldwide 26 million people die because of heart failure. In Europe, 45% of the overall number of deaths is related to cardiovascular diseases. Despite all the technological advances, no final and optimal solution to the problem has been found yet. Indeed, heart transplantation is still the only way to guarantee a normal life to the end-stage patients. For these reasons, the HybridHeart project aims to develop an alternative solution to the already available ones, trying to combine the power of the soft robotics actuation, the advances in tissue engineering and the farsighted ideas of transcutaneous energy transfer systems, to guarantee biomimetism, biocompatibility and lower the risk of infections.

The main aim of this document is to integrate all the known physiological requirements, and all the expected technological constraints, that we consider to be needed decision-making factors during the development of an innovative generation of total artificial hearts. In every section. we tried to, not only present our main design goals, but also position them with respect to the ones characterizing the already developed, and sometimes commercialized, total artificial hearts.

 

 

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Seminar on soft robotics for cardiac support

The Hybrid Heart Consortium is organizing an internal seminar on the 29th of May 2019 at the TU Eindhoven in the Netherlands to bring together all partners and students involved in the project, and to share and discuss the progress of the development of soft robotics technology for cardiac support.

The day will start with presentations by all PhD students involved in the project. First, AMC and AMOLF will share the status of a systematic review of artificial heart technology that they are currently working on. After that, SSSA Pisa will present the status of their work on the soft McKibben actuators that, following a biomimetic approach, will be placed in a soft matrix to develop a soft pumping heart. Next, AMOLF will present their work on the robust soft sensing and control technology that they are developing using soft fluidic networks instead of electronic circuits. Following these presentations on the soft robotic technology, we will continue with presentations focusing on the anti-fouling and tissue-engineering coatings that are being developed at TU Eindhoven.

Additionally we host an invited talk about fluidics and fluid mechanics applied to cardiac support and transcutaneous energy systems, by prof Marcel Rutten, assistant professor at the TU/e department of Biomedical Engineering, research group Cardiovascular Biomechanics, which will be followed by a tour to show his lab and his custom-made mock circulation apparatus.

Importantly, we will ensure fruitful discussions during the day to streamline efforts between partners, and to identify missing links that need further attention. Next to creating room for debate, this will be achieved by organizing a hands-on practical anatomy session in the laboratory in order to get deeper understanding of cardiovascular physiology and pathophysiology, and by providing a specific session focusing on IP strategy hosted by dr. Marc Roelofs, IXA Amsterdam.

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