RobHeart: Soft Robot for Heart-Like Volumetric Stress on Seeded Cardiac Cells

Mechanical stress plays a vital role in the regulation of several cellular processes. To reduce uncertainties in observations, biological research on cells is usually conducted in-vitro, i.e. on cells grown in highly-controlled lab environments. Although several devices able to reproduce proper stimuli on cells have been recently proposed, still there are several open challenges. Heart cells, for example, require millimetric wells to survive and grow in-vitro. Size of the culture wells for medium-throughput screening, integrability requirements with laboratory techniques, and biocompatibility with living organisms make the development of suitable end-effectors complex. In this work, we present RobHeart, a modular soft robot with deformable end-effectors, fabricated by layering and molding bi-component silicone rubber, and specifically designed to seed and 3D stress heart cells. RobHeart design, fabrication, validation and preliminary tests on cells are presented.