Bioinspired Devices

The book is fact-packed and beautifully crafted… Bioinspired Devices provides a fascinating way into one of biomedicine’s most complex fields. While Goldfield writes with both erudition and elegance, he has a wonderfully popular touch and a keen sense of humor that has him drawing on Wallace and Gromit and Star Trek (and more) to help with key explanations. It is a book that will not only leave you with a deep respect for research into copying nature, but also in awe of nature itself and how it does so much with so little. – Adrian Barnett * New Scientist *Bioinspired Devices: Emulating Nature’s Assembly and Repair Process is a reliquary of nature’s wonders, exploring how cells, organisms, and living systems form and function. Goldfield explains how new insights about these natural building processes are now being leveraged to create ‘biologically inspired’ engineering innovations, from medical devices to robot swarms. After reading this book, you will look at the world in an entirely new way. – Donald E. Ingber, Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering, Harvard UniversityBioinspired Devices takes us on a fascinating journey between nature and engineering. Goldfield extracts key principles for how living systems grow and function and proposes that they be applied to the design of better machines and prostheses. Combining an incredibly rich set of observations from neuroscience, bioengineering, biomechanics, ecology, and more, this book is a stimulating read for anyone interested in living systems and the construction of biologically-inspired devices. – Auke Ijspeert, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology at LausanneBioinspired Devices explores modern bioengineering’s dance between technology and nature, illuminating how the concepts of resiliency, self-repair, and environmental harmony are more evident today than ever before. – Ravi Bellamkonda, Duke UniversityBioinspired Devices presents an original, erudite perspective on how to emulate fundamental characteristics of living systems—self repair, robustness, development, and emergence—in order to engineer bioinspired solutions to neurological disorders. Goldfield builds on his extensive experience with dynamical systems, at Boston Children’s Hospital and via collaborations with Harvard’s Wyss Institute, to discuss challenges and opportunities in unravelling and emulating nature’s principles to build neuroprosthetic devices and pathways to rehabilitation. – Marc-Olivier Coppens, University College London

Eugene C. Goldfield is Associate Professor of Psychology in Psychiatry at Boston Children’s Hospital, Harvard Medical School, and Associate Faculty at the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University.