午夜福利1000集合

A robot that mimics the behaviours of people who have obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) could help us understand what drives the condition and even improve how we treat it.

OCD involves obsessive worrying that compels people to carry out rituals like repeated hand washing. People who have it experience anxiety if they can鈥檛 complete these compulsions.

Researchers are using the robot to recreate this compulsive drive to complete an action. The research is at an early stage, but the team gave New Scientist a sneak preview. As I am someone who has lived with OCD for a long time, the researchers wanted to see what I made of their robot.

Robot functions

The tiny robot is programmed to try to achieve three goals: 鈥渆at鈥�, 鈥済room鈥� and avoid damage caused by bumping into things. The robot can only groom by colliding with a solid post, which inflicts damage. The grooming is intended to mimic a behaviour that can be harmful if repeated excessively.

Just like in our brains, the robot鈥檚 core drives can conflict with each other. The robot eats by touching light patches on the floor of a roughly square-metre-sized enclosure, replenishing its energy. But the damage caused by grooming runs down the robot鈥檚 energy supply.

When these motivations are balanced and the robot is set free to roam, it runs out of energy, and so fails, 10 per cent of the time.

To recreate a compulsive behaviour, the researchers tweaked the robot鈥檚 drive to groom by setting the desired grooming level beyond what the robot can achieve. Under these conditions the robot fails 95 per cent of the time.

Changing behaviour

Current treatment for OCD involves exposing someone to the things that trigger their obsessive thoughts and resulting compulsive behaviours and then preventing them from responding. If the robot can be made to adapt to changes in its environment that mimic exposure to triggers, this could point to future ways to improve treatment, the researchers say.

鈥淪howing the working robot model to patients, but also showing the patient the robot鈥檚 improvement after therapy, might help them to understand and accept the often stressful treatments in which they are exposed to the triggers for their compulsions,鈥� says Naomi Fineberg at the University of Cambridge and a member of the team who created the robot.

As someone with OCD, I am concerned that the robot鈥檚 quirks might reinforce the idea that OCD is all down to weird behaviours, instead of distressing, obsessive thoughts. We鈥檝e been studying people for years, though, so maybe robots do have a role.

However, Trevor Robbins at the University of Cambridge is unconvinced that robots can help us understand what happens in the brains of people with OCD.

鈥淚t might be a clue to understanding OCD and simulating what appears to be repetitive behaviour,鈥� he says. 鈥淏ut it is a long way from specifying how this may occur in a biological system.鈥�