笑い増幅器：笑い増幅効果の検証

抄録

"Laughter is the best medicine" and "The good medicine none superior to laughter", as these proverbs have been existed, it has long been believed that laughter has health-promoting effect. Recently, it is confirmed that laughter has various effects of disease treatment. For example, it normalize NK-cell (natural killer cell) activity, relieve pain of rheumatoid arthritis, inhibit rise in blood sugar level and inhibit allergen reaction. Therefore, laughter is widely demanded from daily situation (cartoon, comedy and TV program) to medical situation of the hospital clown etc. In such background, we want to arbitrarily enhance person's laughter, and convert every situation into laughter. To attain this goal, we assumed that laughter can be enhanced by piling up various laugh induced stimuli (titillation, laughter, cartoon, comedy). Based on this assumption, we proposed noble concept of "Laugh enhancer system". According to this concept, we prototyped a system that produces laugh track (laughter) synchronized with the user's laugh motion. We named the system "Flatters". In this paper, after introducing our system overview, we examined laugh enhancement effect of Flatters.