By Serene Luo

A RESEARCHER in Singapore dreams of the day a robot will offer him a soft, warm handshake instead of a cold, hard grip.

Assistant Professor J.J. Cabibihan of the Social Robotics Laboratory in the National University of Singapore (NUS) is close to realising this, now that he and his team have found a way to mould synthetic fingers that are soft, like a human's.

But Prof Cabibihan, 33, who made a presentation at the Institute for Infocomm Research's seminar on robotics for health care yesterday, has a more immediate use for the creation - prosthetic limbs.

He was speaking to an audience of 50 or so health-care workers, public service officers, academics, researchers and industry players at Fusionopolis near Buona Vista.

Prof Cabibihan said people who have lost their arms to accidents or disease already use rather life-like prostheses. These come flesh-coloured and even have hairs on the surface.

The problem though, he said, is that such prostheses still feel cold and stiff to the touch, so if they can be covered in the fake skin his team has developed, it 'will improve the emotional healing process and shield an amputee from social stigma'.

As part of the project, he had to find out how much force is exerted in a handshake and which parts of the hand come into most contact with the other person during a handshake.

He created several finger prototypes, including one built with a pocket of air under the 'skin' to simulate the softness of a finger pad.

To make the skin feel warm to the touch, Prof Cabibihan, who is also from NUS' electrical and computer engineering department, experimented with putting heated pads under the artificial skin.

Beyond prosthetics, he hopes the 'skin' will eventually make its way onto humanoid robots being developed in Singapore and in the region to work as robotic nurses, receptionists or home helpers.

Other presentations yesterday included those by Singapore General Hospital and Tan Tock Seng Hospital. Both use robots in physiotherapy and other kinds of rehabilitation programmes.

serl@sph.com.sg

This article was first published in The Straits Times.

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