Keepon : Robot Holiday

Thankful for the opportunity last month to photograph the robot Keepon, along with it's inventor  Dr. Marek Michalowski and Richard North of WOW Stuff, all of us juggling for space at the beautiful Bloomberg Business Week editorial office in SF.

There is the therapeutic robot, seen above, and the toy version, which will hit stores this holiday season, of course. This line from the story, written by Ashlee Vance, stuck in my head:

While testing the gizmo in day-care centers, Kozima found that autistic children made more eye contact with the robot than they did with people. Behaviors they rarely expressed toward humans, like touching and nurturing, became more commonplace. “Using a robot can be a real ice breaker for children and clinicians,” says Anjana N. Bhat, a researcher at the University of Connecticut , who is conducting clinical trials with robots and autistic children.

Read the whole story HERE.