Yuyang comes from the temple
Qubits | Official account QbitAI
A person watching horror movies is not lightly scared?
Perhaps, you need a "hug" from a plush robot.
Just like this, scientists have experimentally proven that when this fluffy guy gently holds your hand, it can effectively relieve your pain and fear.
Don't look at this small "big white" who looks cute, and constantly emphasizes his "chest muscles" when working:
This is indeed a serious study, from the University of Tsukuba, Japan, and the paper has been published in Scientific Reports.
Relieve pain and fear with airbags
The small robot itself is not complicated, mainly composed of three airbags and a pressure sensor, and its "skin" is made of soft fur material.
In terms of control, the robot is connected to a pneumatic system composed of an air pump and a solenoid valve. The external pneumatic system is independently controlled by the Arduino Nano V3.0.
The pressure sensor detects the wearer's grip when the robot is "lying down" on the back of the person's hand.
In this way, when the wearer clenches his fists due to negative feelings such as fear and pain, the small robot can hold back by inflating the airbag.
In fact, this design is based on relevant studies in physiology and psychology: physical contact between people can effectively alleviate people's pain and fear.
To see if the robot could do the same, the researchers organized 66 adult volunteers to participate in the study.
Specifically, there were three control groups in the experiment:
- C1 is the no feedback group. That is, during the experiment, the wearer can hold the robot freely, but the robot will not give any feedback.
- C2 is a random feedback group. That is, during the experiment, the robot randomly inflates the airbag.
- C3 is the response action group. That is, the robot will choose whether to inflate or not according to the actions of the wearer.
During the experiment, the researchers used thermal stimulation to simulate pain.
The Pain Assessment Scale (PAS), measuring the levels of salivary oxytocin and cortisol, and injecting fear scales were used to determine whether the little robot relieved the pain and fear of the volunteers.
The experimental results showed that the subjective pain score of the volunteers under the wearing of the small robot was significantly lower than when they were empty-handed (p<0.01).
Under C3 condition, the level of salivary oxytocin in volunteers decreased when wearing small robots (p=0.051). Overall, cortisol levels in volunteers were also significantly lower at the end of the experiment than at the beginning of the experiment (p=0.003).
Oxytocin levels and cortisol levels are often used to measure how much pain a participant has.
In addition, the results of the injection of the fear scale showed that after participating in the trial, the participants' fear decreased significantly (p<0.001).
To summarize briefly, this study mainly proves that soft and fluffy social robots have great potential to alleviate human pain/fear through human-computer interaction.
Imagine if there was such a robot holding your hand tightly during vaccination...
Moms and dads no longer have to worry about their children getting injections and crying (manual dog head).
The researchers also said that in the future, they want to further integrate AR technology to achieve more human-computer interaction functions to develop solutions that can actually alleviate patients' negative emotions during the process of people's medical treatment.
The research came from Hide's lab at the University of Tsukuba, Chinese, Japan, which aims to develop companion robots that can relieve people's loneliness, anxiety and pain.
Well, that's pretty Japanese.
Paper address: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-022-21183-7
— End —
Qubits QbitAI · Headline number signed
Follow us and be the first to know the latest scientific and technological trends