Heart Statue

The Heart Statue is one of the new 39 statues that have been introduced in the Terraria 1.1 update. It can produce one heart (which gives you 20 health) every 8 seconds assuming energy is provided through a trigger (Pressure plate, Switch, Lever, or timer) and wires.

You can double the output of a heart statue by adding an additional trigger, which will keep its own 8 second timer, provided you pick up the hearts generated from the first trigger before hitting the second trigger. So in the "heart run" picture below, if you had a pressure plate on both sides of the heart statues, you could get two hearts per statue as you ran through.

Setup
The heart statue is arguably one of the best health items in the game. To balance this, only 3 hearts can 'exist' at one time via statues. 60 Health every 8 seconds is nice, but if you set it up properly, you can get even more health:



The idea is to trigger all the triggers in one go. By doing so, you quickly get rid of the newly spawned hearts, letting more spawn, thus allowing you to regain more than 60 health in 8 seconds.

You'll need 20 heart statues to get the maximum of 400 health in 1 sprint, but depending on your evasive skills you can get away with less (for instance if you can generally hold onto 200 health every 8 seconds, then you'll only need 10, if you can manage to keep off a mere 100, then you'll only need 5).

This layout is only truly useful in boss fights, it can't really even be applied for spelunking and the like because it takes a long time to set up (unless you take a common route in which case you can just leave stations).

The total time to regen health depends on how fast you are. Make sure to have a minimum of hermes boots on to increase your speed.