A new robot called Fribo is being used to promote social connectivity and reduce isolation. The technology combines robotics, artificial intelligence, and social networking to make people, mostly young adults, feel connected to their friends. This is accomplished by using ultrasonic sensors to detect your "living noise" and report it to friends. Whatever that means.
In their paper, "Fribo: A Social Networking Robot for Increasing Social Connectedness Through Sharing Daily Home Activities from Living Noise Data," the study designers behind the robot, designboom, argue that social media hasn't really made us connected. We're still living in walled-in communities.
"We believe that Fribo is a robot that reconciles the conflicts between privacy intrusion and social connectedness through sharing daily activity information gathered from living noise," they wrote.
"The rapid increase in the number of young adults living alone gives rise to a demand for the resolution of social isolation problems. Social robot technologies play a substantial role for this purpose."
In a 4-week field study, they studied whether social networking robots (or SN-Robots), like Fribo, could diminish loneliness without violating privacy.
"The robot was designed to test how artificial intelligence could help with loneliness and there's no telling yet whether Fribo will make its way to store shelves."
The strange video below explains how Fribo's "living noise" system works.