Wyss InstituteActuators – Wyss Institute

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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Wasting muscles built back better

Mariel Schoen — Mon, 14 Nov 2022 15:55:28 +0000

By Benjamin Boettner (BOSTON) — Muscles waste as a result of not being exercised enough, as happens quickly with a broken limb that has been immobilized in a cast, and more slowly in people reaching an advanced age. Muscle atrophy, how clinicians refer to the phenomenon, is also a debilitating symptom in patients suffering from neurological disorders, such as amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS)…

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Biohybrid fish made from human cardiac cells swims like the heart beats

Jessica Leff — Fri, 11 Feb 2022 17:23:04 +0000

By Leah Burrows/SEAS Communications (CAMBRIDGE, Mass.) – Harvard University researchers, in collaboration with colleagues from Emory University, have developed the first fully autonomous biohybrid fish from human stem-cell derived cardiac muscle cells. The artificial fish swims by recreating the muscle contractions of a pumping heart, bringing researchers one step closer to developing a more…

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Of Mice and Massage with Dr. Bo Ri Seo

Jessica Leff — Mon, 15 Nov 2021 18:21:19 +0000

You know those people who say you can’t change tissue? Well Wyss Postdoctoral Fellow Bo Ri Seo explains otherwise on this episode of BodyTalk. She is the lead writer on an exciting paper. Dr. Bo Ri Seo is a biomedical engineer who has been studying mechanobiology and mechanotherapy to develop therapeutic strategies for cancer and tissue regeneration. Her research interests are in tissue…

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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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Massage doesn’t just make muscles feel better, it makes them heal faster and stronger

Jessica Leff — Wed, 06 Oct 2021 17:56:26 +0000

By Lindsay Brownell (BOSTON) — Massage has been used to treat sore, injured muscles for more than 3,000 years, and today many athletes swear by massage guns to rehabilitate their bodies. But other than making people feel good, do these “mechanotherapies” actually improve healing after severe injury? According to a new study from researchers at Harvard’s Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired…

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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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Detecting multiple sepsis biomarkers from whole blood – made fast, accurate, and cheap

Jessica Leff — Fri, 12 Feb 2021 16:58:57 +0000

By Benjamin Boettner (BOSTON) — Many life-threatening medical conditions, such as sepsis, which is triggered by blood-borne pathogens, cannot be detected accurately and quickly enough to initiate the right course of treatment. In patients who suffer infection by an unknown pathogen that then progresses to overt sepsis, every additional hour that an effective antibiotic cannot be administered…

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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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