Capacity building & training to develop textile based electronic skin to enable human-robot interaction for the assistance of older-adults in Turkey & the economic growth of the Turkish textile sector

The joint vision of ITU and Coventry University (CU) is to use selectively metallised textiles to produce Electronic Skins (E-Skins) for robots to sense human touch. Using big data learning the E-Skin would enable the robot to understand what emotions are being expressed by that touch. Human-robot interaction will improve the social welfare of older-adults who represent one of the poorest groups in Turkey [1]. We will use a co-design methodology working with older adults to incorporate their ideas into the design of E-Skin enabled robots contributing to the development of digital cities