ABSTRACT
To be welcomed as assistant robots in our daily lives, robots must be liberated from their rigid, programmed logic and made more emotive and empathic to engage with people on their terms [1]. One of the key factors in designing and developing more human-like robots is to understand human emotions and behaviours regarding their pain empathy. This research focuses on the role of emotional touch (painful touch) in humanoid robots in the field of empathy.
This paper explores empathic responses through emotional touch in pain conditions. The study conceptualizes a new product (Pain-empathy Bandage) that will be tested in a series of experiments to evoke emotional touch in humanoid robots.
This new product will allow researchers to explore helping behaviour in Human-Robot Interaction through touch in “pain conditions”. Additionally, the study will show a comparison between different body parts of the robot that creates an “authentic touch sensation”. The study proposes a new method to evoke empathy in HRI through various pain cues (e.g., bandages).
- Lim, A. and Okuno, H.G., 2015. A recipe for empathy. International Journal of Social Robotics, 7(1), pp.35-49.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Yohanan, S.J., 2012. The haptic creature: Social human-robot interaction through affective touch (Doctoral dissertation, University of British Columbia).Google Scholar
- Hall, J.A. and Schwartz, R., 2019. Empathy present and future. The Journal of social psychology, 159(3), pp.225-243.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Paiva, A., Leite, I., Boukricha, H. and Wachsmuth, I., 2017. Empathy in virtual agents and robots: A survey. ACM Transactions on Interactive Intelligent Systems (TiiS), 7(3), pp.1-40.Google ScholarDigital Library
- Malinowska, J.K., 2021. What does it mean to empathise with a robot?. Minds and Machines, 31(3), pp.361-376.Google ScholarDigital Library
- Redstone, J., 2017. Making sense of empathy with sociable robots: A new look at the “imaginative perception of emotion”. In Social robots (pp. 19-38). Routledge.Google Scholar
- Davis, M.H., 1980. A multidimensional approach to individual differences in empathy.Google Scholar
- Bartneck, C. and Hu, J., 2008. Exploring the abuse of robots. Interaction Studies, 9(3), pp.415-433.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Mehrabian, A. and Epstein, N., 1972. A measure of emotional empathy. Journal of personality.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Bock, N., Hoffmann, L. and Rosenthal-vd Pütten, A., 2018, March. Your Touch Leaves Me Cold, Robot. In Companion of the 2018 ACM/IEEE international conference on human-robot interaction (pp. 71-72).Google Scholar
Index Terms
- What doesn't kill you makes you stronger: Conceptualising social robot's pain and Consumer's Empathic response through touch
Recommendations
Observing Robot Touch in Context: How Does Touch and Attitude Affect Perceptions of a Robot's Social Qualities?
HRI '18: Proceedings of the 2018 ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot InteractionThe complex role of touch is an increasingly appreciated horizon for HRI research. The explicit and implicit registers of touch, both human-to-robot and robot-to-human, have opened up pressing questions in design and HRI ethics about embodiment, ...
Simulating empathic behavior in a social assistive robot
When used as an interface in the context of Ambient Assisted Living (AAL), a social robot should not just provide a task-oriented support. It should also try to establish a social empathic relation with the user. To this aim, it is crucial to endow the ...
Should Empathic Social Robots Have Interiority?
Social RoboticsAbstractIn this article we discuss whether robots need "interiority" in order to competently participate in emotional and empathic dynamics with human partners. We draw on original research on emotions, mind, neurophysiological mechanisms of social ...
Comments