You don’t want to be among the first human cyborgs. Because doctors won’t be replacing all your limbs with super-strong robotic ones, and they won’t be giving you cameras for eyes. More than likely, they’ll be saving your life by wrapping your heart in a robot.
Today in the journal Science Robotics, researchers introduced a new kind of device to keep a heart pumping: It cradles the organ and uses a probe to anchor to the wall that separates the heart’s lower chambers. The robot can precisely manipulate a particular chamber, and that could lead to devices that let doctors assist a heart in its normal function instead of relying on a transplant. (Another sort of robotic heart announced earlier this year envelops the organ like a sleeve, but this new robot can work on a single diseased chamber.)
These days, doctors keep a heart pumping blood with something called a ventricular assist device. This is a pump external to the body that helps ferry blood around when the heart just can’t manage on its own. Problem is, because blood is flowing through machinery, the patient has to take blood thinners to make sure the works don’t get gummed up. And doctors don’t like putting people on blood thinners if they can avoid it.
This new robot is incorporated…
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