Engineer Eric Markvicka, along with graduate students Ethan Krings and Patrick McManigal, recently presented a paper at the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation in Atlanta, Georgia, that sets forth a systems-level approach for a soft robotics technology that can identify damage from a puncture or extreme pressure, pinpoint its location and autonomously initiate self-repair.

The paper was among the 39 of 1,606 submissions selected as an ICRA 2025 Best Paper Award finalist. It was also a finalist for the Best Student Paper Award and in the mechanism and design category.

The team’s strategy may help overcome a longstanding problem in developing soft robotics systems that import nature-inspired design principles.

“In our community, there is a huge push toward replicating traditional rigid systems using soft materials, and a huge movement toward biomimicry,” said Markvicka, Robert F. and Myrna L. Krohn Assistant Professor of Biomedical Engineering. “While we’ve been able to create stretchable electronics and actuators that are soft and conformal, they often don’t mimic biology in their ability to respond to damage and then initiate self-repair.”

To fill that gap, his team developed an intelligent, self-healing artificial muscle featuring a multi-layer architecture that enables the system to identify and locate damage, then initiate a self-repair mechanism — all without external intervention.

“The human body and animals are amazing. We can get cut and bruised and get some pretty serious injuries. And in most cases, with very limited external applications of bandages and medications, we’re able to self-heal a lot of things,” Markvicka said. “If we could replicate that within synthetic systems, that would really transform the field and how we think about electronics and machines.”

The team’s “muscle” — or actuator, the part of a robot that converts energy into physical movement — has three layers. The bottom one — the damage detection layer — is a soft electronic skin composed of liquid metal microdroplets embedded in a silicone elastomer. That skin is adhered to the middle layer, the self-healing component, which is a stiff thermoplastic elastomer. On top is the actuation layer, which kick-starts the muscle’s motion when pressurized with water.

To begin the process, the team induces five monitoring currents across the bottom “skin” of the muscle, which is connected to a microcontroller and sensing circuit. Puncture or pressure damage to that layer triggers formation of an electrical network between the traces. The system recognizes this electrical footprint as evidence of damage and subsequently increases the current running through the newly formed electrical network.

This enables that network to function as a local Joule heater, converting the energy of the electric current into heat around the areas of damage. After a few minutes, this heat melts and reprocesses the middle thermoplastic layer, which seals the damage — effectively self-healing the wound.

The last step is resetting the system back to its original state by erasing the bottom layer’s electrical footprint of damage. To do this, Markvicka’s team is exploiting the effects of electromigration, a process in which an electrical current causes metal atoms to migrate. The phenomenon is traditionally viewed as a hindrance in metallic circuits because moving atoms deform and cause gaps in a circuit’s materials, leading to device failure and breakage.

In a major innovation, the researchers are using electromigration to solve a problem that has long plagued their efforts to create an autonomous, self-healing system: the seeming permanency of the damage-induced electrical networks in the bottom layer. Without the ability to reset the baseline monitoring traces, the system cannot complete more than one cycle of damage and repair.

It struck the researchers that electromigration — with its ability to physically separate metal ions and trigger open-circuit failure — might be the key to erasing the newly formed traces. The strategy worked: By further ramping up the current, the team can induce electromigration and thermal failure mechanisms that reset the damage detection network.

“Electromigration is generally seen as a huge negative,” Markvicka said. “It’s one of the bottlenecks that has prevented the miniaturization of electronics. We use it in a unique and really positive way here. Instead of trying to prevent it from happening, we are, for the first time, harnessing it to erase traces that we used to think were permanent.”

Autonomously self-healing technology has potential to revolutionize many industries. In agricultural states like Nebraska, it could be a boon for robotics systems that frequently encounter sharp objects like twigs, thorns, plastic and glass. It could also revolutionize wearable health monitoring devices that must withstand daily wear and tear.

The technology would also benefit society more broadly. Most consumer-based electronics have lifespans of only one or two years, contributing to billions of pounds of electronic waste each year. This waste contains toxins like lead and mercury, which threaten human and environmental health. Self-healing technology could help stem the tide.

“If we can begin to create materials that are able to passably and autonomously detect when damage has happened, and then initiate these self-repair mechanisms, it would really be transformative,” Markvicka said.

Study participants were randomized into two groups, one following the Mediterranean diet and the other following the low FODMAP diet, a common restrictive diet for IBS.

In the Mediterranean diet group, 73% of the patients met the primary endpoint for symptom improvement, versus 81.8% in the low FODMAP group.

Irritable bowel syndrome affects an estimated 4-11% of all people, and a majority of patients prefer dietary interventions to medication.

The low FODMAP diet leads to symptom improvement in more than half of patients, but is restrictive and hard to follow.

Previous investigations from Michigan Medicine researchers into more accessible alternative diets led to a proposed “FODMAP simple,” which attempted to only restrict the food groups in the FODMAP acronym that are most likely to cause symptoms.

“Restrictive diets, such as low FODMAP, can be difficult for patients to adopt,” said Prashant Singh, MBBS, Michigan Medicine gastroenterologist and lead author on the paper.

“In addition to the issue of being costly and time-consuming, there are concerns about nutrient deficiencies and disordered eating when trying a low FODMAP diet. The Mediterranean diet interested us as an alternative that is not an elimination diet and overcomes several of these limitations related to a low FODMAP diet.”

The Mediterranean diet is already popular among physicians for its benefits to cardiovascular, cognitive, and general health. Previous research on the effect of the Mediterranean diet on IBS, however, had yielded conflicting results.

In this pilot study, two groups of patients were provided with either a Mediterranean diet or the restriction phase of a low FODMAP diet for four weeks.

The primary endpoint was an FDA-standard 30% reduction in abdominal pain intensity after four weeks.

All the patients included in the study were diagnosed with either IBS-D (diarrhea) or IBS-M (mixed symptoms of constipation or diarrhea).

This study was the first randomized controlled trial to compare the Mediterranean diet to another potential diet. (Previous studies had compared the Mediterranean diet to the individuals’ typical diets or were not randomized controlled trials.)

While the Mediterranean diet did provide symptom relief, the low FODMAP group experienced a greater improvement measured by both abdominal pain intensity and IBS symptom severity score.

Researchers found the results of this pilot study — which 20 patients completed — sufficiently encouraging to warrant future, larger controlled trials to investigate the potential of the Mediterranean diet as an effective intervention for patients with IBS.

“This study adds to a growing body of evidence which suggests that a Mediterranean diet might be a useful addition to the menu of evidence-based dietary interventions for patients with IBS,” said William Chey, M.D., chief of Gastroenterology at the University of Michigan, president-elect of the American College of Gastroenterology, and senior author on the paper.

The researchers believe studies comparing long-term efficacy of the Mediterranean diet with long-term outcomes following the reintroduction and personalization phases of low FODMAP are needed.

Around the world and across cultures, singing to babies seems to come instinctively to caregivers. Now, new findings support that singing is an easy, safe, and free way to help improve the mental well-being of infants. Because improved mood in infancy is associated with a greater quality of life for both parents and babies, this in turn has benefits for the health of the entire family, the researchers say. The study also helps explain why musical behaviors may have evolved in parents.

“Singing is something that anyone can do, and most families are already doing,” said Eun Cho, postdoctoral researcher at the Yale Child Study Center, and co-first author of the study. “We show that this simple practice can lead to real health benefits for babies.”

“We don’t always need to be focusing on expensive, complicated interventions when there are others that are just as effective and easy to adopt,” added Lidya Yurdum, a PhD student in psychology at the University of Amsterdam, affiliated with the Child Study Center, and co-first author.

Increased singing improves infants’ moods

The new study included 110 parents and their babies, most of whom were under the age of four months. The researchers randomly assigned the parents into two groups, encouraging one group to sing to their infants more frequently by teaching the parents new songs, providing karaoke-style instructional videos and infant-friendly songbooks, and sending weekly newsletters offering ideas for incorporating music into daily routines.

For four weeks, these parents received surveys on their smartphones at random times throughout the day. Parents answered questions related to infant mood, fussiness, time spent soothing, caregiver mood, and frequency of musical behavior. For instance, parents were asked to rate how positive or negative their baby’s mood was within the last two to three hours before receiving the survey. The 56 parents in the control group also received an identical intervention in the four weeks following the initial experiment.

The researchers found that parents were successfully able to increase the amount of time they spent singing to their babies. “When you ask parents to sing more and provide them with very basic tools to help them in that journey, it’s something that comes very naturally to them,” said Yurdum.

Not only did the parents sing more frequently, but they also chose to use music especially in one context in particular: calming their infants when they were fussy. “We didn’t say to parents, ‘We think you should sing to your baby when she’s fussy,’ but that’s what they did,” said Samuel Mehr, an adjunct associate professor at the Child Study Center, and director of The Music Lab. Mehr is also the study’s principal investigator. “Parents intuitively gravitate toward music as a tool for managing infants’ emotions, because they quickly learn how effective singing is at calming a fussy baby.”

Most surprisingly, the responses to the survey showed that increased singing led to a measurable improvement in infants’ moods overall, compared to those in the control group — in other words, parents who sang more rated their babies’ moods as significantly higher. Importantly, improved mood was found in general, not just as an immediate response to music.

While singing did not significantly impact caregivers’ moods in this study, Mehr believes that there could be follow-on effects on health in young families. “Every parent knows that the mood of an infant affects everyone around that infant,” said Mehr. “If improvements to infant mood persist over time, they may well generalize to other health outcomes.”

Follow-up study to further explore singing’s benefits

The team believes that the benefits of singing may be even stronger than the current study shows. “Even before our intervention, these participating families were particularly musical,” Yurdum explained. “Despite that, and despite only four weeks of the intervention, we saw benefits. That suggests that the strength of singing to your babies would likely be even stronger in a family that does not already rely on music as a way of soothing their infants.”

The Child Study Center researchers are currently enrolling parents and babies under four months old in a follow-up study, “Together We Grow,” which will investigate the impact of infant-directed singing over an eight-month period.

Although the researchers did not see an improvement in caregiver mood within four weeks, they are intrigued to see if singing can help alleviate stress or conditions such as postpartum depression in the long term. They are also interested in exploring whether singing might have benefits beyond mood in infants, such as improved sleep.

Previous work from The Music Lab has shown that infant-directed music is universal in humans, and that humans can even infer context of songs — such as whether it is for dancing or a lullaby — in foreign languages and from other cultures. For Mehr, the new findings make sense in light of these basic science results. “Our understanding of the evolutionary functions of music points to a role of music in communication,” said Mehr. “Parents send babies a clear signal in their lullabies: I’m close by, I hear you, I’m looking out for you — so things can’t be all that bad.”

The babies, apparently, are listening.