Arm-A-Dine: The Chest-Mounted Robotic Arm That Feeds You (and Your Friends)

Inspired by The Verge's coverage of this research prototype.

For those celebrating Thanksgiving, there comes a point when you're simply too full to move. The sensible move is to sleep it off before rising groggy later for a second round. But what if technology could help — a chest-mounted robot arm lobbing sweet treats into your open mouth?

That gravy-soaked utopia doesn't exist yet, but researchers from Australia's RMIT University and India's Indian Institute of Information Technology Design and Manufacturing have taken a step toward it with Arm-A-Dine — a robot arm worn on the chest that picks food up off the table and carries it to your mouth, or your dining partner's.

The goal isn't stuffing you to bursting. Arm-A-Dine is a prototype designed to augment the social experience of eating. In their research paper from RMIT's Exertion Games Lab, the team notes that most food technology focuses on food preparation, not the eating experience. In a world of phone-in-hand solo meals, the arm is meant to remind us that eating is a social event.

Here's the clever part: Arm-A-Dine decides who to feed. A facial-recognition app on an attached smartphone reads your dining partner's expression — smile, and the arm offers them the food; frown, and you get it; a neutral expression leaves the arm hovering ambiguously in between.

It's not a commercial product, and the hardware's limitations are obvious: the arms grab only certain items, have limited movement, and aren't very accurate at feeding people. (The paper notes the gripper deliberately stops 10 cm from the wearer's mouth for safety.)

Still, testers reported that the odd contraption genuinely made eating more socially engaging. It made some nostalgic — "it reminded me of my mother feeding me when I was a child" — and forced focus: "I had to focus [...] in order to pick it up [food] properly." Testers even embraced the arm's clumsiness, since working around it meant engaging with the person across the table. As one put it: "The most exciting bit was when the third arm moved strangely in the air. It felt as if the arm was teasing us by fluttering between both our mouths."

So next time you sit down to dinner and your dining partner complains that you shouldn't wave food around the table, tell them you're "augmenting the social experience of dining" — then carry on.

Via IEEE Spectrum.