Comparative Quantification of Contractile Force of Cardiac Muscle Using a Micro-mechanical Force Sensing System

To facilitate the cell based robot research, we presented a micro-mechanical force measurement system for the biological muscle actuators, which utilize glucose as a power source for potential application in a human body or blood vessels. The system is composed of a micro-manipulator, a force transducer with a glass probe, a signal processor, an inverted microscope and video recoding system. Using this measurement system, the contractile force and frequency of the cardiac myocytes were measured in real time and the magnitude of the contractile force of each cardiac myocyte on a different condition was compared. From the quantitative experimental results, we estimated that the force of cardiac myocytes is about 20~40 μN, and showed that there is difference between the control cells and the micro-patterned cells. Index Terms – Cardiac myocytes, Cell force measurement, Micro-manipulation, Piezo resistive sensor.