Therapeutic effects of gentle touch and stroke are growing in attention in hospitals and nursing care centers. These skills play important roles in taktil care and humanitude, among other therapies. In this project, we pursue the realization of gentle stroke for tactile care using a robot. For this purpose, we actually implement and evaluate the physical aspects of robotic gentle stroke. Especially, we focus on the robot’s hand, since this is directly in contact with the care receiver. From the experiments, we found that 1) the hand should have a mechanism to fit the surface to stroke, and 2) the temperature of the hand is also an important factor. Additionally, we discuss future directions to design a robotic hand for similar purposes.

Student members

Tomoki Ishikura
Yuki Kitamura (Graduate in FY2018)
Kenta Toyoshima (Graduate in FY2017)

Reference

K. Toyoshima, M. Ding, J. Takamatsu and T. Ogasawara: “What is Required for a Robot to Gently Stroke a Human using its Hand”, Proceedings of ICRA2018 Workshop on Elderly Care Robotics Technology and Ethics (WELCARO 2018), 2018.

Acknowledgement

This work was supported by JST CREST Grant Number JPMJCR17A5, Japan. This work was supported by JST Research Complex Promotion Program.