Can a robotic teddy bear help alleviate hospitalized children’s anxiety, pain and isolation? That is the hope of Dr. Peter Weinstock, the director of Boston Children’s Hospital’s Simulator Program, and Cynthia Breazeal, the director of the personal robots group at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Media Lab. Today, their social robot prototype, Huggable, is a high tech puppet that talks and plays with pediatric patients with the aid of a remote operator. Boston Children’s is funding a 90 person study to see if Huggable can have therapeutic value for kids who must endure long hospital stays.The hospital declined to disclose the amount it has spent on the Huggable study. (NOTE: EMMA IS CHECKING IF THEY WILL CHANGE THEIR MINDS AND TELL US) A third of the children in the study will play with Huggable, another third will interact with an image of it on a tablet, the rest will be given a regular plush teddy bear. All the children will be recorded on video and wear a bracelet called a Q Sensor that measures physiological changes. The hospital is just beginning to collect and analyze the data in an effort to better understand children’s emotional states, something Dr. Weinstock refers to as the fourth vital sign. “We think a lot about heart rate, blood pressure and how much oxygen is in the blood, but we don’t have a great monitor for how the child is feeling right now,” he says. “What we do know is that children who are happier, who feel better, it can have a big effect on healing.” Dr. Breazeal says she wants to work towards making Huggable capable of operating autonomously, without the aid of a puppeteer. The robot could act as a soothing distraction and simultaneously capture data and information from patients, which would be fed to hospital staff, improving continuity of care. “We could some day see this as a standard of care, where every child who comes into the pediatric hospital might get something like this,” says Dr. Breazeal. “It’s not only the health and emotional and recovery benefits, but also logistical and financial, improving efficiency to the overall health system.”