  When they are damaged or injured, soft biological tissues are able to
self-repair and heal. Mechanics is critical during the healing process, as the
damaged extracellular matrix (ECM) tends to be replaced with a new undamaged
ECM supporting homeostatic stresses. Computational modeling has been commonly
used to simulate the healing process. However, there is a pressing need to have
a unified thermodynamics theory for healing. From the viewpoint of continuum
damage mechanics, some key parameters related to healing processes, for
instance, the volume fraction of newly grown soft tissue and the growth
deformation, can be regarded as internal variables and have related evolution
equations. This paper is aiming to establish this unified framework inspired by
thermodynamics for continuum damage models for the healing of soft biological
tissues. The significant advantage of the proposed model is that no \textit{ad
hoc} equations are required for describing the healing process. Therefore, this
new model is more concise and offers a universal approach to simulate the
healing process. Three numerical examples are provided to demonstrate the
effectiveness of the proposed model, which is in good agreement with the
existing works, including an application for balloon angioplasty in an
arteriosclerotic artery with a fiber cap.
