Rebuilding the Body: Soft Robotics and the Future of Bionic Organs
Arianna Menciassi
Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna (SSSA)
Abstract:
With the aging of the population, one of the most pressing challenges in medicine is addressing chronic diseases: diabetes, cardiovascular conditions, and urinary system disorders are affecting an increasing number of patients and represent a significant social and economic emergency.
Organ replacement or the restoration of compromised functions may offer viable solutions, but the technological hurdles involved in these advancements are substantial.
In this talk, the speaker will illustrate how soft robotics technologies can serve as a valuable resource for the development of bionic artificial organs, particularly for internal organs characterized by dynamic cavities—such as the bladder and the heart.
Starting from an initial case study focused on a hybrid implanted and ingestible system for diabetic patients, the presentation will explore the development of an artificial urinary system based on soft robotics technologies, highlighting future clinical challenges and opportunities.
Biography:
Arianna Menciassi (Fellow, IEEE) received the M.Sc. degree in physics from the University of Pisa, Pisa, Italy, in 1995, and the Ph.D. degree in bioengineering from Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna (SSSA), Pisa, Italy, in 1999. She is currently a Professor of bioengineering and biomedical robotics with SSSA, where she is the Team Leader of Surgical Robotics & Allied Technologies within The BioRobotics Institute. She served as Coordinator of the Ph.D. in BioRobotics in the period Feb. 2019-Feb. 2025, and in April 2019 she was appointed as the Vice-Rector of the SSSA for 6 years. Her research interests include surgical robotics, microrobotics for biomedical applications, biomechatronic artificial organs, and smart and soft solutions for biomedical devices.
She pays special attention to the combination of traditional robotics, targeted therapy, and wireless solutions for therapy (e.g., ultrasound- and magnetic-based solutions). She has served for many years as the Co-Chair of the IEEE Technical Committee on Surgical Robotics . Prof. Menciassi is an Editor for the IEEE Transactions of Robotics and APL Bioengineering and she is an Associate Editor for Soft Robotics. She received the Well-tech Award (Milan, Italy) for her researches on endoscopic capsules, and she was awarded by the Tuscany Region with the Gonfalone D’Argento, in 2007, as one of the best 10 young talents of the region. In 2020, she has been awarded with the KUKA Innovation Award, for her activities on robotic assisted focused ultrasound.
Magnetic Micro-/Nanorobots for Biomedical Applications:
From individual and Modular Designs to Microswarm
Li Zhang
The Chinese University of Hong Kong
Abstract:
Robotics at small scales has attracted considerable research attention both in its fundamental aspects and potential biomedical applications. As the characteristic dimensions of the robots or machines scaling down to the milli-/microscale or even smaller, they are ideally suited to navigating in tiny and tortuous lumens inside the human body which are hard-to-reach by regular medical devices. Although the materials, structural design, and functionalization of micro-/nanorobots have been studied extensively, several key challenges have not yet been adequately investigated for in vivo applications, such as adaptive locomotion in dynamic physiological environments, in vivo localization with clinical imaging modalities, the efficiency of therapeutic intervention, biosafety, and their autonomy for the intervention tasks.
Biography:
Li Zhang is a Professor in the Department of Mechanical and Automation Engineering (MAE) and a Professor by Courtesy in the Department of Surgery at The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK). He is also a director of the SIAT – CUHK Joint Laboratory of Robotics and Intelligent Systems; and a project leader in the Multi-scale Medical Robotics Center (MRC), InnoHK, at the Hong Kong Science Park. Dr. Zhang’s main research interests include small-scale robotics and their applications for translational biomedicine. He has authored or co-authored over 300 publications (H-index: 85), including Science Robotics (3), Nature Machine Intelligence (3), Nature Materials, Nature Synthesis, Nature Reviews Bioengineering, Science Advances (12), Nature Communications (6), as the corresponding author. His research work on artificial bacterial flagella was indexed by the Guinness Book of World Records 2012 for the “Most Advanced Mini Robot for Medical Use.” And his research works on magnetic slime robot and microrobotic swarm for endovascular application at CUHK was selected as “Top 10 Innovation and Technology News in Hong Kong” in 2022, 2023 and 2024, respectively, by the Beijing - Hong Kong Academic Exchange Centre. Dr. Zhang is elected as a Fellow of IEEE, ASME, RSC, FAAIA, HKIE, a senior member of the National Academy of Inventors (NAI), a member of the Hong Kong Young Academy of Sciences (YASHK), and an Outstanding Fellow of the Faculty of Engineering at CUHK. He is a Senior Editor of IEEE TASE and IEEE TRO (a top-journal on Robotics).
