#ventricular

Weighing in at 650g, this artificial heart created by a medical engineering team at Bivacor uses magnetic levitation to spin a disc at extremely fast speeds to pump blood to the body and return oxygen-depleted blood to the lungs.

It also doesn’t attempt to mimic the human heart like its 3D printed counterparts. Instead, it rather uses a magnetically levitating centrifugal pump — no valves, no ventricles — that supplies a continuous stream of blood. Oddly enough, that means the patient would technically have no pulse.

Read the full writeup on the Bivacor "Steampunk" Heart at Futurism.com

When Your Heart Needs A Massage 

So these soft robots are used to envelope the heart and designed to deliberately compress and twist the cardiac muscles in order to keep the continuous flow of blood to other parts of the body during a heart failure  and also to preserve the heart during a heart transplant. This is a potential lifesaver especially for the 2000 people who await a transplant annually.

credit: BBC , HARVARD