Effect of robot´s active touch on people´s motivation

This paper presents the effect of a robot´s active touch for improving people´s motivation. For services in the education and healthcare fields, a robot might be useful for improving the motivation of performing such repetitive and monotonous tasks as exercising or taking medicine. Previous research demonstrated with a robot the effect of user touch on improving its impressions, but they did not clarify whether a robot´s touch, especially an active touch, has enough influence on people´s motive. We implemented an active touch behavior and experimentally investigated its effect on motivation. In the experiment, a robot requested participants to perform a monotonous task with a robot´s active touch, a passive touch, or no touch. The result of experiment showed that an active touch by a robot increased the number of working actions and the amount of working time for the task. This suggests that a robot´s active touch can support people to improve their motivation. We believe that a robot´s active touch behavior is useful for such robot´s services as education and healthcare.