I went to a community with Chris and Juliet two months ago. When I passed by the waiting area outside the treatment room, I saw people sitting there with boring, empty eyes, like the lady in this picture.

People have mixed feelings while waiting for doctor, worried? scared? unhappy? I thought, maybe, we can do something to ease this tension, to make people feel better.

How?

Suddenly, something jumped into my mind: a robot comes to you and smiles to you!

I made my imagination into a storyboard as shown.

Thus I got an exciting design opportunity: how can a smile robot ease the tension in the waiting area?

Smile

Smiling is one of the most common things in people’s life; everybody smiles everyday.

It costs you nothing to smile, just like someone wrote in his poem.

Also, smile brings many benefits. There are hundreds of studies focus on how smile can make people feel better. A famous one was done by Robert Zajonc in 1989, his experiment found that people felt good after making the long “e” sound (the muscles go to the almost same positions as smiling). In 2012, scientists of the University of Kansas also found the evidence of simply smiling can reduce stress and increase well-being.

What’s more, smile is contagious. A research group did an experiment at a tram stop on one Monday morning, they sent a man to the crowd, who would begin laughing suddenly. Let’s see what happened next (experiment of NEW Laughing Buddha).

Among these facts, there is a good business: trade smile. Everyone is going to be winner :P, because it costs you nothing, brings you benefits and is easy to be passed on.

It seems that a robot is helpless in the situation of waiting room, compared with the doctor and the nurse. However, it could be helpful. Japanese made a robot named Geminoid TMF in 2010, which can move its rubber facial skin to imitate a smile. According to the report, the developers said they expected the robot to be eventually used in real-life situations, for example in hospitals. “We’ve already got some data showing that the robot gave patients psychological security by nodding and smiling at them.” I believe this kind of function comes from the magic of smile.

How would you feel when a robot smile to you? A good case of studying how human beings behave when you facing a robot is Tweenbot. It is an AI-less smiling robot with a flag saying that “Help me to go home.” When it was roaming in the street, it got stuck or tumbled. It is interesting that people who saw these, stopped walking, helped him up and let him head on. Finally, the Tweenbot got home.

While looking at human beings’ response to the smile robot, Chris helped me realise that I have come into a very interesting and challenging field, affective computing. Affective computing is the study and development of systems and devices that can recognise, interpret, process and simulate human affects. It is getting popular in the domains of artificial intelligence and human computer interaction. Some developers and designers will take human affects into account while making the robot. The influence of smile is one of the common topics.