Experiments on Human Facial Expressions for Improvement of Simplified Robot Face

A new health care system using a simplified robot face has been developed. Patient's health care data can be stored in a personal computer and a robotic system can take many actions depending on the stored data. It can tell a patient what time to take his/her medication and warn them if they fail to take their medication at the appropriate time. The robotic system can communicate with a patient using facial expressions, a voice communication system and a personal computer monitor. The robot face was designed using simple mechanisms in order to achieve a low cost system. Only seven DOF are used to give facial expressions. The facial impressions of the simplified robot have been categorized with a questionnaire by over 500 people. In this paper, the experiments on human facial expressions are conducted in order to improve our simplified robot face used for a health care system.