As a frontier of biology,mechanobiology plays an important role in tissue and biomedical engineering.It is a common sense that mechanical cues under extracellular microenvironment affect a lot in regulating the behaviors of cells such as proliferation and gene expression,etc.In such an interdisciplinary field,engineering methods like the pneumatic and motor-driven devices have been employed for years.Nevertheless,such techniques usually rely on complex structures,which cost much but not so easy to control.Dielectric elastomer actuators (DEAs) are well known as a kind of soft actuation technology,and their research prospect in biomechanical field is gradually conced due to their properties just like large deformation (＞ 100％) and fast response (＜ 1 ms).In addition,DEAs are usually optically transparent and can be fabricated into small volume,which make them easy to cooperate with regular microscope to realize real-time dynamic imaging of cells.This paper first reviews the basic components,principle,and evaluation of DEAs and then overview some corresponding applications of DEAs for cellular mechanobiology research.We also provide a comparison between DEA-based bioreactors and current custom-built devices and share some opinions about their potential applications in the future according to widely reported results via other methods.