HelloSpoon, an adorable and affordable mealtime assistant robot!

Hello to everybody!

My name is Luis García and I'm the developer behind HelloSpoon robot.
What is HelloSpoon? Well, HelloSpoon is a mobile based robot inspired in a baby elephant to spend with children with upper limb difficulties, children with special needs and elderly three of the most important hours of the day for all of us (breakfast, meal, dinner).

Here I want to share with all of you one video of me testing HelloSpoon before doing the real testing with children and elderly, just to be 100% sure that HelloSpoon is safe enough to share some time with other people :-)

A little thecnical info about HelloSpoon:
HelloSpoon is using as main core one mobile app with PocketSphinx as voice recognition engine, as servo controller I'm using one OpenCM-9.04 type B and as the robotic trunk I'm using the "new" Dynamixel XL-320.

HelloSpoon is a project I've been working on for a bit more than a year, first it was using Dynamixel Ax-12 servos but when XL-320 where presented at the beginning of this year I started to use them because one of the main ideals behind HelloSpoon is offer an affordable, fun and easy to use robot.

Please feel free to leave a comment, if you like it, if you hate it, anything 
And if you like, why don't share it in any of your social media? So more people will know that a development like HelloSpoon is being made 

Thanks!

Update:

In the new video you can see some improvements on the UI after the feedback received this days! 

While some people loved cheering and music, older people might find this obnoxious, awkward and very repetitive. That's why I decided to modify the UI to invite the user to turn on/off some capabilities they might like/dislike.

Also other improvements on the behavior of the app and HelloSpoon in general.

Have a great day!

Update (August 5th):

Watch the new HelloSpoon video with children reacting for the first time ever to a robot feeding them!

Feel free to enjoy the video as much as the children :-)!

Update (August 13th):

Meet Mr. Amado Gonzalez, he suffered an accident and injured his right arm. As a right handed person he's having big problems trying to feed himself using a spoon, and also he feels ashamed asking other people to feed him. 

He wanted to try HelloSpoon robot and here's the video for you to see how it turned out!

Let's make... more people watching this video sharing it with your family and friends through your social media! That definitely will be awesome and help make HelloSpoon more known :-)!

Thank you!!

Update (August 18th):

HELLOSPOON ROBOT EVOLUTION (February 2013 - July 2014)

HelloSpoon is a robot I've been working on for more than one year, but I was ready to share it with a larger community just a few weeks ago. 

I thought it was important to show how it looked when I started to imagine HelloSpoon here in my bedroom since February 2013. Please take a look and see how HelloSpoon evolved from an expensive robot attached to a wooden box, to a more complex, affordable and deep solution :-).

Thanks!!

Update (September 10th):

HelloSpoon is about to start a crowdfunding campaign to improve the trunk design and motions with the help from the Dutch care center Eizt. I hope to count with your support to show to the world that HelloSpoon is a robot that can change and improve lives.

Websites are writing about it, take a look!:

http://botbench.com/blog/2014/09/07/making-meals-fun-hellospoon/

http://www.roboticstoday.com/news/coming-soon-hellospoon-an-affordable-meal-assistance-robot-3040/

I hope you can donate or share it with your network when the campaign goes live in September 16th, any of those options will be really helpful and I'll be extremely grateful with all of you who decide to support HelloSpoon :-)

Update (September 16th):

The Indiegogo campaign just went live a few hours ago and I would like to know if I can count with your support for share it!

http://igg.me/at/hellospoon

Thank you very much to everybody who decides give me a hand :-)!

Follow closely HelloSpoon development through Google plus and Twitter!

Google Plus: +LuisGIII, there I share very detailed stuff about the dev :-)

Twitter: @HelloSpoon Also everything is shared but not every detail.