ABSTRACT Tissue repair and biosensing are important for restoring body functions and enabling real‐time health monitoring in modern medicine. Soft implants hold significant potential for supporting tissue integration and enabling continuous biosensing, yet their clinical translation is impeded by the invasiveness of conventional surgical implantation and the challenge of delivering them in a functional form through narrow, minimally invasive pathways. These limitations lead to tissue damage, inflammatory responses, poor long‐term integration, and limited device functionality. Stimuli‐responsive materials, which dynamically adapt their properties in response to physical or chemical cues such as temperature, light, moisture, or magnetic fields, offer a promising pathway to minimally invasive implantation and conformal biointegration. This review systematically examines material systems based on water‐, thermal‐, light‐, magnetic‐, electrical‐, and pH‐responsive mechanisms and discusses their integration into minimally invasive implantable devices for brain, peripheral nerve, and cardiac applications. Finally, key challenges, including material performance, evaluation systems, device encapsulation, and clinical translation, are discussed, emphasizing the importance of interdisciplinary efforts in advancing responsive soft implants toward minimally invasive tissue repair and biosensing.
Chen et al. (2026) studied this question.