“With this technology in the future, we’ll be able to understand things about our loved ones that we weren’t able to see before, things that calm them, things that stress them,” Dr. Picard said, adding that it will be true even for people without communication challenges.
“I’ve always thought of the skin as a covering, hiding what goes on inside our body,” she said. “Who would have ever thought of our skin as a peephole?”
The robotic head built at Cambridge University is part lark, part serious. It is the brainchild of Peter Robinson, a professor of computer technology at Cambridge who one day got annoyed that his GPS device kept chirpily leading him into traffic jams.