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Bioresponsive hydrogels are emerging with technological significance in targeted drug delivery, biosensors and regenerative medicine. The design challenge is to effectively link the conferred biospecificity with an engineered response tailored to the needs of a particular application. Moreover, the fundamental phenomena governing the response must support an appropriate dynamic range, limit of detection and the potential for feedback control. The design of these systems is inherently complicated due to the high interdependency of the governing phenomena that guide sensing, transduction and actuation of the hydrogel. The objective of the dissertation is to review the current state of bioresponsive hydrogel technology and introduce a method of extending the technology through integrated control loops; explore fundamental phenomena which affect ion transport within biomimetic hydrogels; and investigate, via in silico studies, the fundamental design parameters for the implementation of a feedback control loop within a bioresponsive hydrogel. In one study, effects of valence number, temperature and polymer swelling o