3D-printed hearts at the Great Exhibition Road Festival

The group was back at the festival on 6 and 7 June 2026, with a stand in the Queen's Tower Rooms where visitors watched 3D printers at work, segmented hearts in our games and tested what they knew about the heart in mini-games.

This year’s festival marked 175 years since the Great Exhibition of 1851, and around 57,000 people came to South Kensington over the weekend, where more than 100 Imperial research teams showed their work. Ours was in the Happiness and Health zone, and visitors of all ages found it by following the colourful 3D-printed hearts hanging from the ceiling. The stand showed how engineers and researchers model the heart, and what a cardiac digital twin is: in one game, visitors tuned a simulated heart until its ECG matched the one recorded from a model torso.

Three activities at the stand: 3D-printed hearts hanging from the ceiling, a model torso wired up for an ECG beside a screen comparing measured and simulated leads, and a board asking “Can you guess my heart?”

Cristobal Rodero, Aditi Kulkarni, Angela Lee, Anna Hekkink, Arthur Lefebvre, Edward Ashton, Isaac Hayden, Ludovica Cicci, Maximilian Balmus, Molly Monks, Rosie Barrows, Shambhavi Malik, Sheng-Ya Wang and Tiffany Baptiste ran the stand across both days, with Lucy Bland, who volunteered from outside the group.