Deep Pressure Therapy: A Promising Anxiety Treatment for Individuals With High Touch Comfort?

One method for managing anxiety, a highly prevalent modern mental health condition, is the calming touch sensations of deep pressure therapy (DPT). Solutions for administering DPT include the Automatic Inflatable DPT (AID) Vest, which we designed in past work. Although benefits of DPT are clear in a subset of the related literature, these benefits are not ubiquitous. There is limited understanding of what factors lead to DPT success for a given user. In this work, we present the findings of a user study ( N = 25) that evaluates the effects of the AID Vest on anxiety. We compared physiological and self-reported measures of anxiety across Active (inflating) and Control (inactive) states of the AID Vest. In addition, we considered the presence of placebo effects and assessed participant comfort with social touch as a potential moderator. The results support our ability to reliably induce anxiety, and show that the Active AID Vest tended to reduce biosignals related to anxiety. We also found a significant relationship between comfort with social touch and reductions in self-reported state anxiety for the Active condition. Those who seek to successfully deploy DPT can benefit from this work.

How should robots exercise with people? Robot-mediated exergames win with music, social analogues, and gameplay clarity.

Introduction: The modern worldwide trend toward sedentary behavior comes with significant health risks. An accompanying wave of health technologies has tried to encourage physical activity, but these approaches often yield limited use and retention. Due to their unique ability to serve as both a health-promoting technology and a social peer, we propose robots as a game-changing solution for encouraging physical activity. Methods: This article analyzes the eight exergames we previously created for the Rethink Baxter Research Robot in terms of four key components that are grounded in the video-game literature: repetition, pattern matching, music, and social design. We use these four game facets to assess gameplay data from 40 adult users who each experienced the games in balanced random order. Results: In agreement with prior research, our results show that relevant musical cultural references, recognizable social analogues, and gameplay clarity are good strategies for taking an otherwise highly repetitive physical activity and making it engaging and popular among users. Discussion: Others who study socially assistive robots and rehabilitation robotics can benefit from this work by considering the presented design attributes to generate future hypotheses and by using our eight open-source games to pursue follow-up work on social-physical exercise with robots.