Fribo is a robot that aims to connect people who live alone as it’s hailed as a “social networking robot” that was designed with a goal of “increasing social connectedness.” In the video below you can see a veritable spread of ways the robot works and how it can be incorporated into everyday life, but the breakdown is that it essentially alerts you to things that happen with your friends. For example, it can be connected into your smart home network, and if someone arrives home and turns on the lights, the robot can alert you to this scenario.
The same can be done for you as the robot has the ability to alert you to the happenings of your friends when you arrive home just as it can alert your friends that you walked in the door. This works sort of like a briefing of the day’s events, but instead of everything that happened throughout the day it gives you a brief mention of activities that have been completed by your friends, such as the fact that they’ve arrived home before you. While it might seem a bit invasive in this day and age of increased privacy awareness, the idea is to keep people that live alone connected with friends and family and people they care about as a way of preventing complete isolation and cutoff from personal exchanges.
Through the alerts on what’s happening with friends or family via the Fribo robot, it can foster actual communication between you and others through messages. It’s a way to initiate staying in contact with those close to you so you don’t become closed off. It does this through a socially connected group chat that links a number of users together, and when alerts about stuff that happens from one user’s robot comes through to the rest of the group, users can send messages through the group chat conversation, or use a knock twice gesture to send out a direct message that asks what the person is doing. Other gesture motions, such as clapping, can send direct messages as well that are pre-configured so they don’t have to be typed out. The robot seems like more of a concept for the moment as it doesn’t appear to be available in any commercial form, but the idea behind creating such a device, which comes from researchers out of South Korea’s Yonsei University