Shulou(Shulou.com)11/24 Report--

Write article | Skin

Revision | A Xian

In a recent study, researchers at Cornell University created a wearable device that relieves your anxiety and makes you feel happy.

When you wear it on your arm, you can experience the feeling of being "masturbated by a cat".

Electric cat hand? | Ref. 1 the key part of this equipment is actually composed of a generator, a spring and a small brush. When the device is turned on, Mao Mao's brush will paddle on your arm. So, it is such a device, why can it relieve anxiety?

In previous studies, scientists have found that physical touch will affect our emotions. For example, when a friend is sad, you can gently hold TA's hand and give TA some small support.

in bad mood? Shake hands Giphy and now in the field of emotional neuroscience, scientists are beginning to focus on "emotional touch". It's a slow, gentle sense of touch, and you can try to imagine gently touching or touching a furry object on your hand.

Generally speaking, the sense of touch of our skin can help us distinguish pressure, vibration, sliding and the texture of objects, which is the conclusion that the receptors on the skin are introduced into the brain nerve.

However, in our daily life, we will also find that touch not only lets you know what you are touching, but also brings other emotional feelings. Studies have found that emotional touch can activate the emotional control center of our brain, the insular, especially the posterior part of the insular, giving us pleasant feelings, conveying positive emotions, reducing social exclusion, and increasing pain tolerance.

I experienced it immediately, indeed. | take science home in an experiment in which 40 participants were lying in bed with a delicate, hairy brush constantly stimulating their left arm. However, one group of brushes were constantly stroking and moving on the skin, while the other group was constantly vibrating. The results showed that the constant stroking of the brush increased the heart rate variability index compared with vibration.

Heart rate variability (HRV) refers to the interval between heartbeats and is now considered to be an indicator of the flexibility of your autonomic nervous system. To put it simply, the higher the HRV, the better your ability to regulate emotions. Mental disorders such as anxiety, autism and depression are associated with abnormally low HRV.

Therefore, the emotional improvement caused by emotional touch may also be caused by you stroking the cat and stroking the dog, or being masturbated by the cat. ), the reason why you will feel happy and less stressed. The researchers who made the wearable device mentioned on social media that the study was inspired by kittens.

The cat is late! | amputated by oneself, and the results of this experiment also showed that the participants who were touched by the "hairbrush" wearable device had lower stress and anxiety, and participated in mood regulation.

However, different people have different requirements for emotional pacification. For example, some people like to pet the cat at work (if there is a cat), while others want to get close to the kitten after work. Therefore, in the discussion, the researchers also designed an "emotional touch intervention system", which can not only detect your stress level, automatically pacify you every time you are stressed, but also manually control the pacification time. It is hoped that in the near future, this obedient "electric cat paw" can really be designed.

In fact, there are already cute comfort gadgets on the market. At the Consumer Electronics Show in 2022, Yukai Engineering, a Japanese company, showed off a robot that looks like a plush cat / dog toy, but engineers have set a "Hamgorithm" inside it, which means it will nibble your finger gently.

The slogan on the official website of the product is: there are new discoveries in every mouthful. | hamham.ux-xu.com designers believe that most people like the feeling of being "gently gnawed", which can bring you some pleasure.

Real cat: won't "gently" at all | bring science home. Nowadays, in addition to being used for productivity, robots can also be used to convey different emotions. The THING Lab team at the University of Colorado, which works on multi-sensory design, found that emotional robots broaden the possibility of "emotional communication."

The physical contact between the robot and you can also affect your mood by designing and modifying various types of emotional touch, such as modifying the material of the robotic arm, or converting the touch into shaking or patting.

Robot hands of different materials will give you a different feeling. | reference 5 designer Ran Zhou imagines the application scenario of this kind of robot. For example, a robotic hand installed on a theater seat can touch you through emotional changes in the plot of the movie; or, when you eat too much sugar, the lid of the sugar box will pat you angrily; there may also be pillows that pat and comfort you.

There are many modes of physical touch that can be set. | Ref. 5. Future robots may not all be hard-core cool, but can also be soft, soothing, and closer to our daily routine.

Reference:

[1] Zhao, Yiran, et al. "Affective Touch as Immediate and Passive Wearable Intervention." Proceedings of the ACM on Interactive, Mobile, Wearable and Ubiquitous Technologies 6. 4 (2023): 1-23.

[2] Morrison, India. "ALE meta-analysis reveals dissociable networks for affective and discriminative aspects of touch." Human brain mapping 37.4 (2016): 1308-1320.

[3] Triscoli, Chantal, et al. Heart rate variability is enhanced by long-lasting pleasant touch at CT-optimized velocity. "Biological psychology 128 (2017): 71-81.

[4] https://hamham.ux-xu.com/

[5] Zhou, Ran, et al. "EmotiTactor: Exploring How Designers Approach Emotional Robotic Touch." Designing Interactive Systems Conference. 2022.

[6] https://www.ranzhourobot.com/emotitactor/

This article is from the official Wechat account: bring Science Home (ID:steamforkids), author: everything.

Welcome to subscribe "Shulou Technology Information " to get latest news, interesting things and hot topics in the IT industry, and controls the hottest and latest Internet news, technology news and IT industry trends.