Hugs are one of the first forms of contact and affection humans experience. Due to their
prevalence and health benefits, roboticists are naturally interested in having robots one day …

The paper investigated the effects on a person being touched by a robot to motivate her.
Human science literature has shown that touches to others facilitate efforts of touched …

Background The worldwide population of older adults will soon exceed the capacity of
assisted living facilities. Accordingly, we aim to understand whether appropriately designed …

For an artifact such as a robot or a virtual agent to respond appropriately to human social
touch behavior, it should be able to automatically detect and recognize touch. This paper …

Social touch is essential to everyday interactions, but current socially assistive robots have
limited touch-perception capabilities. Rather than build entirely new robotic systems, we …

Educational technology constitutes an important aspect in modern education providing
unique learning experiences to students and improving their learning. Technological …

In order to facilitate integration into domestic and public environments, companion robots
can seek to communicate in a familiar,“socially intelligent” manner, recognizing typical …

This work presents the development and implementation of a unified multi-sensor human
motion capture and gesture recognition system that can distinguish between and classify six …

Although whole-body touch interaction, eg, hugging, is essential for human beings from
various perspectives, not everyone can interact with intimate friends/family due to physical …

For robots to be accommodated in human spaces and in daily human activities, robots
should be able to understand messages from their human conversation partner. In the same …