This paper introduces robotic implants as a novel class of medical robots in the context of treating esophageal atresia. The robotic implant is designed to apply traction forces to the two disconnected esophageal segments to induce sufficient growth so that the two ends can be joined together to form a functioning esophagus. In contrast to the current manual method of externally applying traction forces, the implant offers the potential to avoid prolonged patient sedation and to substantially reduce the number of X-rays required. A prototype design is presented along with evaluation experiments that demonstrate its capabilities to apply traction forces to ex vivo esophageal tissues.

Design-by-analogy is considered to be a powerful tool for engineering design. The difficulty of finding suitable analogies for solving a given design problem gives rise to the current efforts on computational tools for analogy-based design. In searching for analogies, the critical functions in a design problem are potential search criteria. The study described in this paper investigates whether novice designers identify an expert-derived critical function in a design problem under three scenarios: when they are asked to report the important functions in the problem, when they are directly asked to report the critical function and when they are asked to use design-by-analogy. It is observed that student designers do not identify the expert-derived critical functions when directly asked or when asked to list important functions. However, they inherently use the expert-derived critical functions in their analogical mapping process. This suggests that, during analogical reasoning, designers tend to identify and use the same critical functions regardless of experience, and also that critical functions are valid search criteria for deriving analogies from a computational database. This insight is highly valuable for current efforts to develop computational tools for analogical reasoning.