Biomedical Applications of Shape-Memory Polymers: A Short Review

Shape-memory polymers ()SMPs) are an important class of intelligent materials which have attracted much attention in recent years, due to their prominent characteristics such as light weight, high recovery strain, low cost and ease of fabrication compared to shape-memory alloys. Shape-memory polymers can be deformed and fixed into a temporary shape, and recover their original permanent shape only upon asmall variation in environmental conditions such as heat, electric field, magnetic field, pH, light, ions, solvent, sonic field, enzyme, water and etc. This capability results from a combination of the polymer structure and the polymer morphology together with the applied processing and programming technology which is simply termed asshape-memory effect ()SME). Polymers that exhibit SME are an important class of materials in medicine, especially for minimally invasive surgery deployment of devices. These unique properties make SMPs suitable and useful materials for various technological applications, including the manufacturing of smart biomedical devices. In this review, recent developments and common limitations in the design of SMPs especially for biomedical applications are discussed.