A soft robotic sleeve placed around the heart in a pig model of acute heart failure. The actuators embedded in the sleeve support heart function by mimicking the outer heart muscles that induce the heart to beat. An international team of scientists has developed a soft robotic sleeve that can be implanted on the external surface of the heart to restore blood circulation in pigs (and possibly humans in the future) whose hearts have stopped beating. The device is a silicon-based system with two layers of actuators: one that squeezes circumferentially and one that squeezes diagonally, both designed to mimic the movement of healthy hearts when they beat. Heart failure affects 41 million people worldwide.

WASHINGTON – Scientists are developing a robotic sleeve that can encase a flabby diseased heart and gently squeeze to keep it pumping. So far it has been tested only in animals, improving blood flow in pigs. But this "soft robotic" device mimics the natural movements of a beating heart, a strategy for next-generation treatments of deadly heart failure. The key: A team from Harvard University and Boston Children's Hospital wound artificial muscles into the thin silicone sleeve, so that it alternately compresses, twists and relaxes in synchrony with the heart tissue underneath. It's a dramatically different approach than today's therapies and, if it eventually is proven in people, it might offer a new alternative to heart transplants or maybe even aid in recovery.

In this photo provided by Harvard University, a pig's heart encased in a robotic sleeve designed to gently squeeze a diseased heart so it better pumps blood. Researchers at Harvard and Boston Children's Hospital developed the experimental device in hopes of improving treatment of heart failure, when the heart becomes too weak to pump.

A revolutionary new'soft robotic heart' that fits like a glove around the organ could help people with heart failure. Conventional mechanical hearts pump the patient's own blood through their body using a propeller. But the problem with this is that the pump comes into contact with the patient's blood – putting it at risk of clotting. This needs to be controlled using blood thinning drugs. The new design fits outside the patient's own heart like a glove, squeezing it to make it beat.