  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.
