Evaluation of Relationship between Stroke Pace and Speech Rate for Touch-Care Robot

Abstract

Humanitude is a multimodal communication care method that utilizes seeing, touching, and speaking. Moreover, a touch-care method is well known as an effective care method mainly focus on touch motion. These kinds of care techniques are effective in practical situations, however, it is difficult to provide such care therapy to all patients due to the lack of human resources. To address this problem, researchers try to develop a touch-care robot that can provide touch-care automatically. Conventional research of touch-care robot mainly focuses on the movement of stroke or the speech that only considers the impression of the contents of speech but not prosodic information. Therefore, in this research, we focus on the speech rate in the prosodic information with stroke motion. In this work, we investigate the effects of speech rate on the prosodic information and evaluate the relationship between stroke pace and speech rate to improve human comfort. We conducted a user study with 6 participants around 20 years old males. As a result of the list of the questionnaire suggests a correlation between stroke pace and speech rate that provides comfort.