Soft robotics in medical applications: State of the art, challenges, and recent advances

Robotics is seeing increasing applications in the medical field, but these are often limited by size and rigidity. By employing nonrigid mechanical structures, soft robotics allows for safer human interactions and is more readily adaptable to wearable medical devices. In addition, soft robotic devices provide greater freedom of movement and facilitate navigation in tight spaces and less deterministic geometries such as inside the human body. This chapter reviews soft robotic applications in the medical field as well as recent and prospective challenges. We focus on the recent advances and state-of-the-art applications, namely, rehabilitation, assistive devices, cardiac devices, and surgical robots. We point to general challenges such as modeling, implementation, simulation, and application-specific challenges that we will examine in the respective sections.