A Talking Teddy Bear Practicing in the Pediatric Hospital

Would you want your child to hug this teddy bear?

The "Huggable" robotic teddy bear is "featured with a full body sensitive skin with over 1500 sensors, quiet back-drivable actuators, video cameras in the eyes, microphones in the ears, an inertial measurement unit, a speaker, and an embedded PC with 802.11g wireless networking. An important design goal of the Huggable™ is to make the technology invisible to the user. You should not think of the Huggable™ as a robot but rather as a richly interactive teddy bear." ( "Huggable - Social Robotic Companion")
A Talking Teddy Bear Practicing in the Pediatric Hospitalby Emma Cott, The New York Times, 3 June 2015

This is the fourth episode in a Bits video series, called Robotica, examining how robots are poised to change the way we do business and conduct our daily lives.

Can a robotic teddy bear help alleviate anxiety, pain and isolation for children in a hospital?

That is the hope of Dr. Peter Weinstock, the director of a training program at Boston Children’s Hospital called the Simulator Program, and Cynthia Breazeal, the director of the personal robots group at M.I.T.’s Media Lab. The two have collaborated to bring Huggable, a social robot prototype developed at the lab, into the hospital, which is financing a 90-person study to determine whether the robot can have therapeutic value for children who have to endure long hospital stays.
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