Is a massage from a machine as good as a massage from a person? Is a massage from a machine as good as a massage from a person? Can one really relax while being prodded by large robotic arms? I am alone in a dimly lit room, splayed face down on a table. Megan Thee Stallion's Mamushi is bumping from a speaker, and on a large screen, two white circles roam up and down an outline of my body.

I had My first-ever professional massage last December during a spa day with some friends. Everyone opted for a traditional massage, which required a preliminary consultation. They disrobed, and the massage took place in a private room. I opted for a shiatsu massage--a clothed experience in a semiprivate area, and while I felt physically relaxed afterward, I didn't have the best time. My limbs were stretched painfully too far, and I couldn't wait for it to be over.

HMNC Brain Health CMO Dr. Hans Eriksson and biomarkers associate director Dr. Daniel Gehrlach explain the development of the'precision psychiatry' diagnostic tool. Technology is changing faster than ever, and so is the way we take care of ourselves. Imagine having a smart device that can check your health at home in less than a minute or an AI solution that can help you stop snoring, sleep better or feel more relaxed. Well, these are just some of the incredible products that we saw at CES 2024, the world's biggest tech show. From leggings that stimulate your muscles to robots that massage your back, here are 10 health devices that stole the show this year.

In this paper, we focus on inferring whether the given user command is clear, ambiguous, or infeasible in the context of interactive robotic agents utilizing large language models (LLMs). To tackle this problem, we first present an uncertainty estimation method for LLMs to classify whether the command is certain (i.e., clear) or not (i.e., ambiguous or infeasible). Once the command is classified as uncertain, we further distinguish it between ambiguous or infeasible commands leveraging LLMs with situational aware context in a zero-shot manner. For ambiguous commands, we disambiguate the command by interacting with users via question generation with LLMs. We believe that proper recognition of the given commands could lead to a decrease in malfunction and undesired actions of the robot, enhancing the reliability of interactive robot agents. We present a dataset for robotic situational awareness, consisting pair of high-level commands, scene descriptions, and labels of command type (i.e., clear, ambiguous, or infeasible). We validate the proposed method on the collected dataset, pick-and-place tabletop simulation. Finally, we demonstrate the proposed approach in real-world human-robot interaction experiments, i.e., handover scenarios.

Imagine having a live-in masseur available to pummel away at your aching back at the end of each day; one who never gets tired, or suggests that maybe it is time for you to return the favour. Enter the Backhug: a robotic therapist equipped with 26 mechanical fingers to scan the unique curvature of your spine and press away stiffness in the joints of your back, neck and shoulders, with nothing more than a whirr and occasional squeak of complaint. Exhausted by the effort of repeatedly pressing his own thumbs into their back joints to relieve their pain, Lee did what many employees fantasise about, and designed a robotic clone to partly replace himself. When I was invited to try one of these "robotherapists", I jumped at the chance. Despite taking regular exercise, I suffer from many of the above complaints, and was intrigued to see what difference six weeks of daily massage could make.

The Transform Technology Summits start October 13th with Low-Code/No Code: Enabling Enterprise Agility. A recent New York Times article concludes that new AI-powered automation tools such as Codex for software developers will not eliminate jobs but simply be a welcome aid to augment programmer productivity. This is consistent with the argument we're increasingly hearing that people and AI have different strengths and there will be appropriate roles for each. As discussed in a Harvard Business Review story: "AI-based machines are fast, more accurate, and consistently rational, but they aren't intuitive, emotional, or culturally sensitive." The belief is that "AI plus humans" is something of a centaur, greater than either one operating alone.

THE COFFEESHOP is an engine of social mobility. Barista jobs require soft skills and little experience, making them a first port of call for young people and immigrants looking for work. So it may be worrying that robotic baristas are spreading. RC Coffee, which bills itself "Canada's first robotic café", opened in Toronto last summer. "[T]he barista-to-customer interaction is somewhat risky despite people's best efforts to maintain a safe environment," the firm says.

You can now get a massage without having to rely on another human being or leave your home, thanks to newly developed robot masseurs. French company Capsix Robotics and researchers at the University of Plymouth in the UK have both created robots that can give personalised massages. The Capsix model has a robotic arm with sensors and a camera that allow it to adapt to the individual user's body shape.

Armed with a bottle of Lysol and rolls of paper towels, Anya Fetcher packed up her car with enough food to get her through a road trip, and clothes to last several weeks, and headed to a friend's home. The first thing she did when she arrived was ask for a hug. "He started to pull away and I was like, 'Wait, can we just stay here for another second? It's been four weeks since [I've had] any kind of human contact,' " she told me. Thanks to the pandemic, a month of no physical interaction with another human--no hugs, no handshakes, no high-fives or fist bumps--had taken a toll on her mental health.

If you wanted to simplify, CES 2019 could be neatly divided into self-driving cars, giant TVs and health tech. A lot of what we've seen of the latter either tracks your movement or is hardware ingrained into workouts. Spryng is a little different, aimed at speeding up your recovery, reducing muscle soreness by stimulating blood circulation. While looking like an unassuming pair of chunky shinguards, these tech-laced wraps expand and contract around your calves, improving blood flow and feeling very nice in the process. The startup showcased the portable muscle recovery tool at CES, and it's backed up by several scientific papers that elaborate on the medical applications of active compression.