Empirical Data That Robot Hugs Will Be Meaningful

Lately, I’ve been fascinated by treatment of autism. Music therapy is of particular interest, because the performers are usually already so musical in nature. I’ll see if I can rake up links to some of my favorite recordings.

One thing that really caught my fancy recently is Temple Grandin’s Hug Machine (picture to the right), designed to reduce anxiety by applying firm pressure over the body. Temple Grandin, the woman who invented the machine, is autistic and realized the invention while watching cattle branding in a squeeze chute.

During her childhood years, Temple would crave deep pressure. She would crawl under sofa cushions or wrap herself in blankets to provide pressure. She stated that she could not obtain the ‘right’ amount of pressure from people because they either gave her too much deep pressure or too little.

I got a kick out of this interview with Temple, which was posted to The Cattle Pages discussion board, as I suppose the cattle folks felt a reciprocal connection to the machine. In the interview, Temple affirms that the machine’s hugs work as well as hugs from her distant aunt.

When I asked her why one should seek to submit oneself to such pressure, she told me. When she was hugged, especially by a favourite (but vast) aunt, she felt overwhelmed, overcome by sensation; she had a sense of peacefulness and pleasure, but also of terror and engulfment. She started to have daydreams – she was just five at the time – of a magic machine that could squeeze her powerfully but gently, in a huglike way, and in a way entirely commanded and controlled by her. [...]

It’s not just pleasure or relaxation that Temple gets from the machine, but, she maintains, a feeling for others. As she lies in her machine, she says, her thoughts often turn to her mother, her favourite aunt, her teachers. She feels their love for her, and hers for them. She feels that the machine opens a door into an otherwise closed emotional world and allows her, almost teaches her, to feel empathy for others.

After twenty minutes or so, she emerged, visibly calmer, emotionally less rigid (she says that a cat can easily sense this difference in her at these times), and asked me if I would care to try the machine.

In the interview, she talks about testing of the machine a bit and how some psychiatrists saw it as a fixation of hers, rather than a real treatment.

Should study continue, I’m sure that it would be possible to construct machines that are not only better at giving hugs than humans (rather than a single embrace of two arms, thousands of nanohugs), but which are also capable of physically communicating between two people who are at a distance, in ways not possible to humans.

You know, footrubs and things like that.