Robotics presents a promising opportunity for enhancing bathing assistance, potentially to alleviate labor shortages and reduce care costs, while offering consistent and gentle care for individuals with physical disabilities. However, ensuring flexible and efficient cleaning of the human body poses challenges as it involves direct physical contact between the human and the robot, and necessitates simple, safe, and effective control. In this paper, we introduce a soft, expandable robotic manipulator with embedded capacitive proximity sensing arrays, designed for safe and efficient bathing assistance. We conduct a thorough evaluation of our soft manipulator, comparing it with a baseline rigid end effector in a human study involving 12 participants across $96$ bathing trails. Our soft manipulator achieves an an average cleaning effectiveness of 88.8% on arms and 81.4% on legs, far exceeding the performance of the baseline. Participant feedback further validates the manipulator's ability to maintain safety, comfort, and thorough cleaning.

翻译：机器人技术为增强沐浴辅助提供了有前景的机会，有望缓解劳动力短缺、降低护理成本，同时为身体残障人士提供持续且温和的护理。然而，确保对人体进行灵活高效的清洁面临挑战，因为这涉及人与机器人之间的直接物理接触，且需要简单、安全且有效的控制。本文介绍了一种柔性可扩展的机器人操作器，它嵌入了电容式接近传感阵列，专为安全高效的沐浴辅助而设计。我们对软体操作器进行了全面评估，并在涉及12名参与者、总计96次沐浴试验的人体研究中，将其与基准刚性末端执行器进行了比较。我们的软体操作器在手臂上的平均清洁效率达到88.8%，在腿部达到81.4%，远超基准性能。参与者的反馈进一步验证了该操作器在保持安全性、舒适性和彻底清洁方面的能力。