MIT has directed its attention towards the medical world and presented its highly innovative Huggable Robot Teddy, a tech toy on the verge of becoming a very sophisticated medical gadget. Pretty soon, seeing doctors handing their patients cuddly toys instead of medicine won't be as weird as it may sound now, and all this thanks to the scientists and engineers over at MIT.

Although the Huggable Robot Teddy is still in an uncompleted state, it already announces itself as a technical wonder of communication and data collection. Lined with over 1500 sensors for direct data transmission, the teddy has cameras for eyes, microphone field in the ears and an internal wireless PC. Despite all this, it looks like a cute teddy bear that we all used to hug when we were kids.

 

Thanks to the ear microphones, the robotic toy can localize sounds, thus being able to interact with people around it. However, its most praised feature is its “sight.” This way, the teddy features a “stale panorama,” a visual interface meant to raise the robot's space awareness, since the cameras in its eyes have quite a narrow field of vision.

 

What the stale panorama does is take separate video frames automatically when it is placed in any new room, as the bear points its head around it. Then, the bear's software mods the pictures into one large slide, which, combined with the automatic face detection function, allows the teddy to naturally follow a person around the room, face-to-face.

 

Nevertheless, the most important feature for the medical field is represented by the sensitivity of its sensors, which record electrical field, force and temperature data every time the bear is touched. The Huggable Robot Teddy is likely to become an animal companion in hospitals, given the fact that it understands nine classes of affective touch, like tickling, patting, poking, scratching, rubbing, squeezing, slapping, petting and light contact, also being able to build appropriate replies.

 

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