Haptic communication robot for urgent notification of hearing-impaired people

Abstract

A proposed robot provides functionality inspired by the behavior of hearing dogs, which assist hearing-impaired people by alerting them to important sounds such as fire and smoke alarms. Hearing dogs use body contact for communication with hearing-impaired people, a process heavily depending on haptic communication. The proposed robot also uses physical contact for urgent notification, like a hearing dog's touching behavior. The robot can move using its wheels and then approach and bump people. To be explicit our proposal, our bumping behavior model was simplified and an experiment was conducted with hearing-impaired participants and a prototype robot. This paper reports the experimental results and discusses effectiveness of the robot's bumping behavior.