Towards Advanced Emotional Care: Embodied Emotional Care System for Humanoid Robots

In modern healthcare, emotional well-being is critical to patient recovery and overall outcomes. However, limited availability of trained professionals and time constraints often hinder the delivery of consistent emotional support. To address this gap, we propose the Embodied Emotional Care System (EECS), a comprehensive humanoid robotic framework designed to deliver personalized emotional care through an integrated, multi-layered architecture. EECS analyzes dynamic facial expressions and real-time vocal inputs to extract the patient’s emotional state and semantic information, constructs context-aware prompts processed by an LLM for reasoning, and ultimately generates empathetic dialogues synchronized with human-like facial expressions and natural body movements to address diverse emotional support needs. Experimental results show that deploying EECS on a humanoid robot significantly boosts patient engagement through real-time multimodal interaction, delivering deeper emotional support and a more human-like therapeutic experience. Furthermore, it bridges gaps in professional emotional support resources, offering a feasible pathway to improve overall healthcare quality.