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Prapela: from understanding infant breathing rhythms to treating newborn babies

Jessica Leff — Thu, 20 Nov 2025 17:50:12 +0000

Part of the Wyss Institute’s series on the positive, life-altering impact of federal research funding By Jessica Leff About half of premature infants suffer from sleep apnea, which involves pauses in their breathing. Apnea of prematurity can be life-threatening, as it lowers heart rates to dangerous levels, and can even be a risk factor for sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS). Conversely…

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Soft robotic, wearable device improves walking for individual with Parkinson’s disease

Jessica Leff — Fri, 05 Jan 2024 14:21:45 +0000

By Leah Burrows / SEAS Communications (CAMBRIDGE, Mass.) — Freezing is one of the most common and debilitating symptoms of Parkinson’s disease, a neurodegenerative disorder that affects more than 9 million people worldwide. When individuals with Parkinson’s disease freeze, they suddenly lose the ability to move their feet, often mid-stride, resulting in a series of staccato stutter steps that…

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A personalized exosuit for real-world walking

Jessica Leff — Wed, 10 Nov 2021 19:10:21 +0000

By Leah Burrows/SEAS Communications (CAMBRIDGE, Mass.) — People rarely walk at a constant speed and a single incline. We change speed when rushing to the next appointment, catching a crosswalk signal, or going for a casual stroll in the park. Slopes change all the time too, whether we’re going for a hike or up a ramp into a building. In addition to environmental variably, how we walk is…

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Soft Robotic Glove for Neuromuscular Rehabilitation

admin — Tue, 29 Jun 2021 23:34:39 +0000

The majority of people with neurological conditions, such as stroke and spinal cord injury, suffer from loss of motor function in one or both hands, which can greatly reduce their quality of life. Tasks often taken for granted become frustrating or nearly impossible due to tight and spastic muscles, reduced grasping strength, and general lack of coordination in the hand.

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Transforming circles into squares

Jessica Leff — Wed, 14 Apr 2021 15:00:13 +0000

By Leah Burrows / SEAS Communications (CAMBRIDGE, Mass.) – Reconfigurable materials can do amazing things. Flat sheets transform into a face. An extruded cube transforms into dozens of different shapes. But there’s one thing a reconfigurable material has yet to be able to change: its underlying topology. A reconfigurable material with 100 cells will always have 100 cells, even if those cells are…

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Microrobotic Laser-Steering Medical Device for Minimally Invasive Surgery

admin — Thu, 14 Jan 2021 04:59:00 +0000

Endoscopy has proven extremely useful in many areas of medicine because it can be carried out with relatively few risks in a short time, and be used to diagnose and treat numerous diseases. In gastroenterology, endoscopies of the upper gastrointestinal tract (esophagus, stomach, first part of the small intestine; upper GI endoscopies) and lower gastrointestinal tract (small intestine…

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Robotic swarm swims like a school of fish

Jessica Leff — Wed, 13 Jan 2021 19:00:52 +0000

By Leah Burrows / SEAS Communications (CAMBRIDGE, Mass.) – Schools of fish exhibit complex, synchronized behaviors that help them find food, migrate, and evade predators. No one fish or sub-group of fish coordinates these movements, nor do fish communicate with each other about what to do next. Rather, these collective behaviors emerge from so-called implicit coordination — individual fish…

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A Laser Steering Device for Robot-Assisted Surgery

Jessica Leff — Wed, 13 Jan 2021 18:58:55 +0000

Responding to an unmet need for a robotic surgical device that is flexible enough to access hard to reach areas of the G.I. tract while causing minimal peripheral tissue damage, Researchers at the Wyss Institute and Harvard SEAS have developed a laser steering device that has the potential to improve surgical outcomes for patients. Credit: Wyss Institute at Harvard University…

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Wielding a laser beam deep inside the body

Jessica Leff — Wed, 13 Jan 2021 18:58:36 +0000

By Benjamin Boettner (BOSTON) — Minimally invasive surgeries in which surgeons gain access to internal tissues through natural orifices or small external excisions are common practice in medicine. They are performed for problems as diverse as delivering stents through catheters, treating abdominal complications, and performing transnasal operations at the skull base in patients with neurological…

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Bioelectronic device achieves unprecedented control of cell membrane voltage

Jessica Leff — Thu, 24 Sep 2020 16:00:07 +0000

By Tim Stephens / University of California, Santa Cruz (SANTA CRUZ, CA) — In an impressive proof-of-concept demonstration, an interdisciplinary team of scientists has developed a bioelectronic system driven by a machine learning algorithm that can shift the membrane voltage in living cells and maintain it at a set point for 10 hours. Every living cell maintains a voltage across the cell…

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