Open Heart Robot combines the openHeart LED with a 5V pulse sensor to facilitate a special kind of communication. The boundary between human and robot is blurred as the user sees their own heartbeat represented digitally on the robot’s chest. The anthropomorphized features of the robot, combined with the illusion of controlling the beating heart, invites users to connect and respond to an inanimate object in a very human way.

Further development is required to connect the robot’s speech mechanism to a corresponding range of heartbeats. A BPM result that is outside the normal human range (>65 or <140 BPM) for a sustained period of time will prompt the robot to declare “You are one of us”. If the robot detects a human-like heartbeat (66-139 BPM) it will say “You are not a robot”.