Toward an Affective Touch Robot: Subjective and Physiological Evaluation of Gentle Stroke Motion Using a Human-Imitation Hand
This work is an incremental step towards developing robots capable of affective touch, which could benefit care work by mitigating stress and pain for recipients.
This research explores the emotional effects of gentle stroking motions from a robot using a human-imitation hand. It found that subjects evaluated strokes similarly between human and robot hands at different speeds, with faster strokes (30 cm/s) eliciting greater pleasure and arousal.
Affective touch offers positive psychological and physiological benefits such as the mitigation of stress and pain. If a robot could realize human-like affective touch, it would open up new application areas, including supporting care work. In this research, we focused on the gentle stroking motion of a robot to evoke the same emotions that human touch would evoke: in other words, an affective touch robot. We propose a robot that is able to gently stroke the back of a human using our designed human-imitation hand. To evaluate the emotional effects of this affective touch, we compared the results of a combination of two agents (the human-imitation hand and the human hand), at two stroke speeds (3 and 30 cm/s). The results of the subjective and physiological evaluations highlighted the following three findings: 1) the subjects evaluated strokes similarly with regard to the stroke speed of the human and human-imitation hand, in both the subjective and physiological evaluations; 2) the subjects felt greater pleasure and arousal at the faster stroke rate (30 cm/s rather than 3 cm/s); and 3) poorer fitting of the human-imitation hand due to the bending of the back had a negative emotional effect on the subjects.