What is a "smoking robot" that pushes cigarettes like a human being and sends it to the artificial lung?

A robot that "smokes" its cigarette like a human when setting a cigarette in parts like a gatling gun was developed by Wyeth Applied Biology Engineering Laboratory. Since the aspirated smoke passes through a microchip simulating the human trachea, it is possible to accurately study how bad smoking affects the lungs,Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease(COPD) and electronic cigarette can be deepened.

Mimicking life-like cigarette smoke exposure and patient-specific responses in human lung airway chips | Wyss Institute
https://wyss.harvard.edu/mimicking-life-like-cigarette-smoke-exposure-and-patient-specific-responses-in-human-lung-airway-chips/

Harvard Has a Cigarette - Smoking Robot. And It's Here To Help | Digital Trends
http://www.digitaltrends.com/cool-tech/cigarette-smoking-robot/

The research team of Wyeth Applied Biology Engineering Laboratory, who was studying how smoking affects people, developed a "smoking robot" to conduct more accurate testing than conventional methods. Around the center of the image, you can set up to 12 cigarettes in a part like a Gatling gun or a rotary magazine, it can ignite with a cigar lighter. You can set conditions such as the frequency with which the robot will tobacco, sucking strength, interval and so on.


Tobacco smoke sucked by the robot is sent to an artificial lung microchip having a fine microchannel (microchannel) called "airway-on-a-chip". The microchannel is lined with the skin tissue of the bronchioles of the lungs taken from a healthy human or from a patient with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and it can analyze exactly how tobacco smoke affects the lungs is.


Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease is known as a disease once it develops, but there are few exact studies to investigate how much smoking worsens chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, and there are few studies on chronic obstructive pulmonary disease The research has been stagnating for a long time. With the development of a smoking robot that combines physiological respiration and artificial lung, it is possible to compare by individual smoker's condition, such as whether the patient's condition is due to genes or whether it is related to home environment or work environment It seems that it will help to locate the cause of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease deterioration.

In addition, you can see how the robot actually smokes from the following movie.

Smoking Human Lung Small Airway-on-a-Chip on Vimeo