For their experiment, led by researchers from Toyohashi University of Technology in Japan, the scientists showed 15 volunteers 56 different color photographs from the first-person perspective of both a human and a human-shaped robot hand in different painful and non-painful situations. Some of the pictures showed a human or a robotic finger being cut by a knife, while others showed the knife at a safe distance from the human or robot hand. They attached electroencephalography (EEG) devices to the volunteers to measure their neurological responses to each image.
Theresearchers found that the human observers showed similar empathic neural responses to the robots as they did to other humans. In their paper, they attributed these empathy levels to the design of the robothand.