The idea behind elder care robotics has been around for years. Its relevancy, however, has become increasingly more apparent as the gap between the number of available caregivers and the world’s aging population continues to widen. This population problem is already very real in countries like Japan, where there will be an estimated shortage of 1 million caregivers by 2025. The U.S. is facing a similar dilemma — as the percentage of people aged 65 or older is expected to rise to roughly 26% by 2050.
Researchers all around the world are proactively striving to help solve this problem and are independently working to create autonomous robots that are capable of performing similar, if not the exact same, tasks as caregivers.
The Role of Robots in Elderly Care
Using medical robots for elderly care will vastly reduce the current astronomical cost of elderly care. Additionally, it will pick up the slack in terms of the number of caregivers available as the ratio of elderly to nonelderly people shifts. Medical robots are a growing industry. According to the International Federation of Robotics World Robotics 2018 Service Robots report, medical robot sales increased 73% in 2017 over 2016, accounting for 2.7% of all professional service robot sales. There are numerous ways that medical robotics can help the elderly:
- Robots can perform small tasks like fetching food and water.
- Some elder care robots handle social and emotional needs by providing entertainment through games, helping remind them of events and appointments, and providing social engagement.
- Other eldercare robots take a more direct, muscular approach and use powerful hydraulics to help provide mobility and transportation support to seniors.
The Future is here:-
A class of social robots – mobile robotic telepresence (MRT) systems – have already been shown to generate positive social interactions with elderly patients. MRTs are essentially video screens on wheels raised to head height that can be controlled remotely using a simple Smartphone app. They allow relatives and social workers to “visit” elderly people more often, even if they live in rural or distant places. The elderly patient doesn’t need to operate the device, leaving them free to interact with their social worker or family.
As noted previously, humans use physical appearance and physical attributes to categorize and form impressions. This impression-forming process also applies to robots. Humans tend to observe a robot’s physical attributes and assign it a social place and competency; this is anthropomorphism, or the assigning of human characteristics to nonhuman entities. This aspect of human nature is taken into account when designing social robots and programming their interactions. Another attribute taken into account when designing social robots is the application for which they are being built. Breazeal (2003) presented four subclasses of social robots, which have been supplemented by Fong et al. (2003). The initial four classes correspond to different social robot designs that lead to the creation of social robots that respond according to humans’ perceptions of them.
What’s next for Elder Care Robots?
While it’s not entirely certain what the future will hold in term of elder care robotics, ongoing industry trends indicate that future projects will involve robots capable of being interconnected with appliances and home automation, and that are able to use telepresence technology that allows loved ones to check in from afar. Future elder care robots will also more than likely have the ability to take on medical diagnostics, as well as use facial recognition algorithms to determine how someone is feeling.
But despite all of this future capability, there still exists a dichotomy of things that robots can do way better than humans and things they simply cannot do at all. For instance, an elder care robot in the future may easily be able to find and retrieve a pill box from another room, however, without an excellent mobility system, it will be stopped dead in its tracks should it get caught on something along the way.
Collaboration and integration between researchers, private industry, investors, and the government will be the key in the years to come.