NEC Develops World's First Physical AI That Predicts and Reduces Human Stress

NEC Develops World's First Physical AI That Predicts and Reduces Human Stress

On March 12, 2026, NEC announced the development of the world's first Physical AI that predicts and autonomously mitigates human stress. This innovative technology leverages NEC's proprietary world model to predict and quantify human movement and psychological state in real-time, enabling robots to navigate autonomously along paths and at speeds that minimize human stress.

At the core of this technology is a unique world model that integrates two predictive models. The first model considers the robot's behavior and surrounding environmental information to predict a person's three-dimensional position and posture with high accuracy. The second model quantitatively estimates the degree of stress a person feels in real-time based on the positional relationship and relative speed between the human and the robot. By combining these two models, the robot can autonomously select movements that are psychologically comfortable for humans.

Conventional robot control technology has primarily focused on physical collision avoidance, but NEC's Physical AI goes a step further by achieving control that also considers human psychological comfort. For example, when a robot passes a person in a narrow corridor, it doesn't simply avoid a collision — it automatically calculates and maintains a speed and distance that prevent the person from feeling anxiety or a sense of pressure.

This technology is expected to find applications in environments where humans and robots coexist closely, such as small and medium-sized logistics warehouses, factories, and retail stores. Until now, safety concerns have hindered robot deployment in such environments, but NEC's Physical AI makes it possible to implement comprehensive safety measures that include psychological safety.

Japan faces a serious labor shortage that has become a significant social issue, making the utilization of robots an urgent priority. NEC's Physical AI is expected to significantly lower the barriers to robot adoption by elevating human-robot coexistence from the level of physical safety to psychological comfort, contributing to the resolution of labor shortages and improvements in productivity.