Magnetic soft robots in biomedicine: From remote actuation to diagnostic-therapeutic integrated systems

Magnetic soft robots, created by embedding magnetic components in soft polymer matrices, represent significant progress in minimally invasive biomedical platforms. These systems navigate through narrow and winding anatomical pathways without causing tissue damage, while maintaining conformal contact and gentle interaction with biological tissues. External magnetic fields offer deep tissue penetration and precise spatiotemporal control, enabling fast response, multi-degree-of-freedom movement, and programmable shape changes. This review comprehensively covers material systems, fabrication methods, and actuation mechanisms for magnetic soft robots, with detailed analysis of motion patterns under gradient, rotating, and alternating magnetic fields. We evaluate their performance in major applications including targeted drug delivery, minimally invasive surgery, and implant-assisted tissue repair. Special focus is given to integrated diagnostic-therapeutic systems with embedded sensing functions, which support real-time physiological monitoring and enable adaptive control in dynamic biological environments. The review concludes by outlining research directions toward combined actuation-sensing-control systems and their potential to advance precision medicine through long-term monitoring and personalized therapies, thus guiding development of future intelligent medical systems.