Arm-A-Dine

"Arm-A-Dine": Towards Understanding the Design of Playful Embodied Eating Experiences BACKGROUND: This research investigates how robotics tools can be combined with playful social dining systems, to create a mutually joyful feeding experience. CONTRIBUTION: This project offers "Arm-A-Dine!", an augmented social eating system, consisting of wearable robotic arms attached to diners' body for eating and serving food. Unlike the normal biological arm, whose actions are guided by one's own volition, in Arm-A-Dine, the movements of the third arm are controlled by the affective responses of the eating partner. By approaching the subject in this way, the research offers a tangible example of how we could potentially regulate both quantity and eating speed when we no longer control eating actions autonomously, and we allow the robotic technology to playfully subvert these actions. SIGNIFICANCE: This project creates a baseline study of how robotic technology can positively affect the social eating experience going beyond the current paradigm of assistive healthcare technology, where feeding process has been identified not only as a high source of stress for both caregivers and care-receivers but also an opportunity to motivate patients to eat, enjoy the food (Ford 1996). This project has the potential to be transferable across multiple social and family eating contexts, for example when trying someone else's dish or in a romantic relationship, where feeding is believed to facilitate bonding and empathy as inspired by the literature on mother-infant feeding (Eyer 1994). This work has already received 5 citations and was exhibited at prestigious venues such as ACM CHI PLAY 2018 and ACM UIST 2017. It also received wider media attention with stories on Digital Trends, Mashable, The Verge and IEEE Spectrum among others. It was selected for a student innovation award at the prestigious UIST 2017 and underpins further investigations in the discipline of HCI.