Physiological Expression of Robots Enhancing Users' Emotion in Direct and Indirect Communication

Abstract

One of the important factors in medical and nursing care recently has been arousing the emotions of patients. Many types of communication robots and pet robots have been developed as communication partners for patients. The user's emotions are stimulated during direct communication with the robot, although there is less chance that the robot will approach the user in other situations such as watching TV and listening to music without disturbing him or her.The user feels that the robot is troublesome during the user's other tasks. The purpose of this research is to elevate the user's emotional experience through emotional expression by physiological expressions of a partner robot in the user's daily life. Ambient but emotional expressions of physiological phenomena are perceived by touch, even when the user is concentrating on other tasks. First, we focused on breathing, heartbeat and body temperature as the physiological phenomena. From the results of the evaluations of the robot's heartbeat and body temperature, along with our previous results for the breathing, each expression has arousal and pleasure axes of the robot's situation. In this paper, we focus on The joint attention of the robot and user to an emotional photograph, and we verified whether the strength of the user's own emotional response to the content was changed by the physiological expressions of the robot while they looked at photographs together. The results suggest that the physiological expression of the robot would make the common emotional experience of users the user's own emotion in the experience more excited and more relaxed.