A number of companies have explored the idea of humanoid robots as future home-helpers for elderly people. The latest experiment from Japan is distinctly more bear-shaped, though.
31. O Children of Adam! Take
your adornment (by wearing your clean clothes), while praying and going round (the Tawaf of ) the Ka'bah, and eat and drink but
waste not by extravagance, certainly He (Allah) likes not Al-Musrifun (those who waste by extravagance).
32. Say (O Muhammad ): "Who has forbidden the
adoration with clothes given by Allah, which He has produced for his slaves,
and At-Taiyibat [all kinds of Halal (lawful) things] of food?"
Say: "They are, in the life of this world, for those who believe, (and)
exclusively for them (believers) on the Day of Resurrection (the disbelievers
will not share them)." Thus We explain the Ayat (Islamic laws) in detail for
people who have knowledge.
33. Say (O Muhammad ): "(But) the things that my Lord
has indeed forbidden are Al-Fawahish (great evil sins, every kind of
unlawful sexual intercourse, etc.) whether committed openly or secretly, sins
(of all kinds), unrighteous oppression, joining partners (in worship) with
Allah for which He has given no authority, and saying things about Allah of
which you have no knowledge."
34. And every nation has its
appointed term; when their term is reached, neither can they delay it nor can
they advance it an hour (or a moment). 7. Surah Al-A'raf (The Heights)
Meet Robear, an experimental nursing-care robot developed by the RIKEN-SRK Collaboration Center for Human-Interactive Robot Research and Sumitomo Riko Company.
Unveiled this month, the robot is designed to lift patients out of beds and into wheelchairs, as well as helping those who need assistance to stand up. Robear weighs in at 140kg, and is the successor to heavier robots RIBA and RIBA-II.
“We really hope that this robot will lead to advances in nursing care, relieving the burden on caregivers today,” said Toshiharu Mukai, leader of the project’s robot sensor systems research team.
“We intend to continue with research toward more practical robots capable of providing powerful yet gentle care to elderly people.”
That’s an increasingly urgent challenge in Japan, where the elderly population is growing fast. According to Riken, robots like Robear can play an important role in taking the strain off nurses and caregivers, who may be having to lift patients 40 or more times a day, risking lower-back pain in the process.
Robear remains a research project for now, as Riken and its partners continue to improve the robot’s technology, reduce its weight, and ensure that it will be safe – in this case, through legs that extend while lifting a patient, to ensure Robear does not topple over.
Japan remains the hub for research into humanoid (or, in the case of Robear, at least human-sized) robots, and not just for healthcare.
Mobile operator SoftBank has put its “emotional” Pepper robot to work collecting customer opinions in its stores, with the device also an effective marketing tool. Japan’s biggest bank, Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group, is also about to start a trial of a customer-service robot called Nao in its stores.
Toyota thrilled and unsettled attendees at the CES show in January in equal measure with its ChihiraAico robot, which resembles a Japanese woman, and is likely to be used to work with elderly people with conditions including dementia, connecting them to medical staff.
“Pepper, dear, when is the next time you’ll visit?”
“Look over here!”
In a third-floor lounge at Nishi-Koigakubo Ninjin Home, a special nursing home in western Tokyo, elderly dementia patients recently spent time with Pepper, a humanoid robot with artificial intelligence being developed by SoftBank Mobile.
Said to be the world’s first robot designed to serve people by recognizing their emotions, Pepper is set to retail for 198,000 yen (about $2,020) on the consumer market in February.
With Japan facing a rising number of dementia sufferers, more businesses have begun to develop products and services to help patients and their families live more comfortably. Such products and services benefit society and also are becoming an important industry, with companies now launching full-fledged efforts to enter the market.
SoftBank Mobile hopes to develop its robot to act as a conversation partner for those suffering from dementia. During its visit that day, Pepper played a game and showed off its dancing skills, thanks to the installation of a prototype program. Seeing the elderly residents smile as they chatted with Pepper, nursing home operator Harue Ishikawa expressed high hopes, saying, “Even with a manpower shortage in the nursing care field, we can provide a higher-quality service if such robots can take over some of the work.”
The number of people suffering from or at risk of dementia is estimated to have exceeded 8 million in 2012, and the figure is expected to increase even more. Meanwhile, the percentage of households comprising either a single person aged at least 65 or an elderly couple without younger family members is forecast to rise from 20 per cent in 2010 and reach 28 per cent in 2035. There also are many senior citizens who live with younger family members but stay alone at home during the daytime while the others are at work.
Kaname Hayashi, who is involved in the development of Pepper at SoftBank, said, “We see a demand for products that will prompt communication and support everyday life by asking the elderly if they have taken their medication and other questions.”
To help prevent the condition of elderly patients from deteriorating to the point where they require nursing care, the firm hopes to give people more options than simply relying on efforts by the central and local governments.
The company plans to develop a program to provide better support for dementia patients, such as by adding a function to encourage the elderly to talk about their memories. “Pepper, who is indefatigable, can always be there as a conversation partner,” Hayashi said.
In 2011, Fujitsu Laboratories Ltd. chose dementia as a research subject.
First, the laboratory staff accompanied dementia patients and their families living in Tokyo on trips to pick mandarin oranges and visit hot springs, aiming to study the kinds of difficulties such people face in their daily lives.
“Products designed for people with dementia should be easy enough for anyone to use,” said Makoto Okada, the lab’s project leader. “[The study] will enhance the value of our products and services.”
PaPeRo, a communication robot developed by NEC Corp. and others, is already taking an active role at such places as nursing care facilities. The company hopes to make it available to the average consumer for less than 20,000 yen (about $204) a month. “The use of products specially developed for dementia patients has been limited to such places as nursing homes,” the company said. “But we believe that they will be soon spreading to ordinary households.”
Kao Corp., which makes daily necessities, set up a special internal team in March 2014 and began research on the disease.
“Various companies have taken an interest in dementia in the last few years, and we’ve been receiving more inquiries,” said Takenobu Inoue, director of the assistive technology department at the Research Institute of the National Rehabilitation Center for Persons with Disabilities. “If well-known makers start to sell products and services that are dementia friendly, it could play a major role in disease prevention. We’re willing to co-operate with companies that can disseminate information.”
The Intelligent Motion Lab was awarded an NSF Ebola RAPID grant to develop tele-nursing robots that would help nurses perform routine care of infectious patients remotely, reducing the frequency and duration of personal contact. Dr. Hauser and his team will assemble remote-controlled robots consisting of a teleconference head, arms, and a mobile base. Working with the Duke School of Nursing, they will determine high-priority tasks in infectious disease care, such as taking vital signs, cleaning bodily fluids, bringing and food, drink, and medication. The team will then develop operator assistance algorithms to allow nurses to control those tasks intuitively and reliably. The team envisions that a majority of clinical tasks can be performed via the robot, while keeping training times minimal and system costs relatively low (less than $100,000).
Hopes remain high that Japan's robot technology will someday replace medical and nursing-care givers.
In the future, when a patient awakes in a hospital, he or she might hear a gentle voice close to their ears. "You seem to be in good condition," the voice will say. The patient will open his or her eyes and see a doctor's face in the monitor of a robot.
A sensor worn around a wrist like a watch will have sent blood pressure and body temperature data to the hospital during the patient's slumber. Wearing a powered exoskeleton suit, which boosts strength, the infirm patient might even hustle down stairs to take a shower.
All the technologies implied here have long been under development or testing. They could be realized in advanced countries in 10 years.
In Japan, nursing care is needed by 6.3% of 70- to 74-year-olds, 26.9% of 80- to 84-year-olds and nearly 70% of people over 90, according to the Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare. Robots and information and communications technologies could replace younger people as main care providers in the future.
"It is expected that Japan will lead the world in this field," said Kazuo Tanishita, executive director at Commons for Medicine and Engineering Japan, a Tokyo association.
The government's revised Japan Revitalization Strategy, released in June, talks of achieving "a new industrial revolution driven by robots" and mentions the use of robots for medical and nursing-care services. According to an estimate by the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry, the domestic market for nursing-care robots will expand from 19.1 billion yen ($166 million) in 2015 to 391 billion yen by 2025.
Fuji Soft conducted a demonstration test with Palro, a humanoid robot, at a hospital in Fujisawa, Kanagawa Prefecture, in early October. In the test, the 40cm-tall robot showed elderly patients how to exercise. "Push up your shoulders," Palro commanded. "Now drop them."
"I was surprised because the robot's movements were just like a human's," said a 69-year-old woman who took part in the test. "The robot will eventually be entrusted with exercise guidance for elderly people," said Junji Uetake, general manager of field sales for the company's robot division.
The government last year designated Kanagawa Prefecture as a Comprehensive Special Zone for Local Revitalization. Small equipment that supports medical rehabilitation and a system that uses microwaves to watch over patients, as well as Palro, are being developed in the prefecture.
"We want to make the prefecture a center for robot development projects in which companies, universities and medical institutions cooperate," a prefectural government representative said. "We can then also expect more jobs to be created."
Toyota Motor has jointly developed a walking rehabilitation robot with Fujita Health University, and plans to start clinical studies later this year. The robot uses the industrial robot and control technologies used on the automaker's car production lines. "Looking hard at the future, we would like to make this kind of robot one of our strong businesses," said Akifumi Tamaoki, general manager of Toyota Motor's partner robot division.
"Japan leads the world in the basic technology for robots," said Yukio Honda, professor at the Osaka Institute of Technology, who served as head of Panasonic's robot development center. However, "the country could fall behind in commercialization if appropriate measures are not taken."
With regard to medical and nursing-care robots, Japan has to train personnel and develop rules. "There are few workers proficient at operating robots in the medical and nursing-care fields," said Yasuhito Sakaguchi, a manager at Daiwa House Industry, which went into the robot business in 2008. With its robot business remaining in the red, the company intends to enhance marketing and emphasize guiding staff at client institutions.
Japan has yet to decide whether public insurance can subsidize the hiring of medical and nursing-care robots or whether compensation would be provided when accidents occur.
Will Japan's advanced manufacturing technology help alleviate the burdens of aging and nursing-care? The next decade will be crucial.
My grandmother got run over by a cable car in San Francisco when she was about six and she wore a wooden leg after that. Of course she hated it. In the glamor days of the 1930s, when the miniskirt look was in (and the steampunk look was not), her wooden prosthetic put her into a social category of Blackbeard more than Greta Garbo.
When I was a kid we’d have weird family outings to go get her a new leg. She’d complain about it but it was still enough of a party that I always got an ice cream from the deal. We did our best to take care of her but she always hated that wooden leg.
Later we put Grandma in a nursing home. I felt bad because I couldn’t see her as much, but I was in college, mom was working, and we had other responsibilities. We did, however, get her a pretty nifty electric wheelchair. I later glued on some fancy sequins, which added a glamor factor at the bridge tournaments in the cafeteria. It was classier than her wooden leg, and it edged her a little closer to her Greta Garbo image.
But glittery electric wheelchairs aside, we had neither the time, the family members, nor the money to take care of her as she deserved. We did what we could with the sequined wheelchair and the weekend visits.
A robot would have come in handy. Here’s why.
Over a third of American adults are family caregivers and most of us already have a job.
By 2050, 16 percent of the global population will be over the age of 65. That’s 1.5 billion people, according to The Population Reference Bureau.
In June, 2013 the Pew Research Center published the report Family Caregivers are Wired for Health. According to the Pew survey 39% of Americans said that they had “provided unpaid care to an adult relative or friend 18 years or older to help them take care of themselves” in the previous year. 70% of the caregivers had other jobs, which means that they’ve got a lot more to do than take care of Grandma. Also, according to a previous Pew study, 47% of American adults say that they expect to be a caregiver for an elderly relative in the future.
Then, about a year later, Pew released another survey – U.S. Views of Technology and the Future – which showed that 65% of those surveyed thought it would be a change for the worse if robots become the primary caregivers for the elderly. And in May of this year The Guardian ran a survey and found that about half of those surveyed thought technology was evolving too quickly and undermining traditional ways of life.
Hence the question is on everyone’s lips
Should we have robot caregivers?
In academic circles the debate rages. Dudley and Emery wrote “The Value of Caregiver Time” (2014. From MIT’s Lee, Stiehl, Toscano, and Breazeal we have “The Semi-Autonomous Robot Avatar As a Medium for Family Communication and Education” (2009). And from CMU’s Borenstein and Pearson we have “Robot caregivers: harbingers of expanded freedom for all?” (2010). The February 2013 edition of, “GeroPsych: Journal of Gerontopsychology and Geriatric Psychology” published a special issue with a series of interesting articles. Fox,Kleinman, and hundreds of others have researched this problem and come to the same core question: Should we?
Sherry Turkle, of MIT, says Nay. She’s launched several invectives against the army of healthcare providers she sees coming over the horizon. A clinical psychologist, Turkle has written that “faux relationships detract from human connections” and “make us less likely to look for other solutions for their care.”
Mainstream media have started pouring gas on the debate as well. Heather Kelly of CNN has asked if robots are “ the future of elder care?”; Health and Medicine explains why patients tell more secrets to virtual humans, and on July 19th of this year Louise Aronson wrote about the future of robot caregivers, arguing that we need them. A few days later, Turkle replied to Aronson’s article, stating that we are in the process of “outsourcing” our ability to care for one another. She and many others claim that our modern media makes us feel lonely.
Robots: The latest victims of the “Technology Makes Us Lonely” meme
In Turkle’s paper “In Good Company” she argues that healthcare robots are cause for grave concern, especially if we expect to have family members replaced by them. She argues that outsourcing to hospital robots should not be done lest we ruin our families, automate our interactions, and become lonelier as a result.
This “Technology Makes Us Lonely” meme has been going around like a bad case of the sniffles. The Atlantic ran a cover story on it back in May 2012 and Turkle wrote a similar op-ed piece in the NY Times to publicize her book “Alone Together”. William Deresiewicz, a literary critic, wrote of “the loneliness of our electronic caves … The more people we know, the lonelier we get … We have given our hearts to machines, and now we are turning into machines.” Meanwhile books like “The Lonely American” and articles about how we’ll not end up just lonely, but broke as a result of robots, give the impression that the Cylon uprising will commence this weekend in a nursing home near you.
Reading this stuff is enough to make anyone lonely. But none of this may come to pass at all. Family members aren’t at risk of being replaced by robots any more than conversations were at risk of being replaced by telephones.
We’ve heard these Manichaean arguments before. We’ve heard of the negative effects of video games, the negative effects of movies, or how “Each hour spent viewing television is associated with less social trust and less group membership,” wrote Robert D. Putnam, a government professor at Harvard who researched the ills of television in the 1950s.
The next generation of robots is going to have a new mix of talents, capable of teaching students the delights of maths or working as a care giver in a nursing home. It is nice to know however that they will also still be doing the jobs we hate like loading up the dishwasher.
The future of robotics was on display on the closing day today of the British Science Association’s festival of science at the University of Birmingham. There is a growing trend of “social robotics”, where robots are programmed to act as partners to humans, rather than as replacements for them.
Developments in computer learning have increased their capabilities and helps them overcome problems on their own without human intervention, said Prof Jeremy Wyatt the head of Birmingham’s computer department.
He presented “Boris” the robotic manipulator, effectively a mechanical hand that can pick up objects, even unfamiliar ones. It scans an object and then picks it up “in the same way as people do”, he said. It can learn and try new moves and becomes better at the task, so much so that Prof Wyatt hopes Boris will be able to load up a dishwasher by April next year.
Clever computers could also be deployed as assistant teachers, ones that have infinite patience but will also respond to their pupils’ emotions. Dr Ginevra Castellano, a senior researcher at the School of Electronic, Electrical and Computer Engineering at the university is leading a large European effort to design “empathic robotic tutors”.
Her robots are helping some 11-13 year-olds with a geography lesson, teaching them to improve their map reading skills in a regular classroom environment.
They communicate “face-to-face” with the humanoid robot, Emote, who speaks, moves and gives updated instructions as the lesson proceeds.
The children get instant feedback from the system, and a camera picks up their facial expressions to figure out their emotional state. “The idea is to collect a lot of data that can be used to train the algorithm, using real-time information to detect children’s emotions and learning process,” says Dr Castellano. She hopes that interaction with robots will ignite the pupils’ interest in STEM subjects (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics).
“We found that teachers are very enthusiastic as long as we involve them in the design phase and they have a say into how the technology can help them,” Dr Castellano said.
Dr Nick Hawes of Birmingham’s school of computer science introduced Bob theautonomous robot. Bob is expected to operate in and around humans and his computer learning software helps him to do this, Dr Hawes said.
Bob is given tasks, on the day they included checking whether security doors at opposite ends of the room were closed and checking whether fire extinguishers were in place. The goal is to start Bob off and then have him operate without any further human intervention for a target of 120 days, Dr Hawes said. “Bob decides for himself what activity it should do to accomplish the task.”
But he could be given many other jobs given his ability to learn suggests Lenka Mudrova a PhD researcher at Birmingham. Austrian collaborators in the research want to use him as an aid in a nursing home context, she said.
He can “see” and interpret the movement of people allowing him to stay out of the way and avoid blockages. Yet his grasp of the local environment means he can spot changes, for example if a person has fallen and is not getting up.
Bob could call for immediate assistance and also reassure the person that help was on the way, Ms Mudrova said. He could detect if windows or doors had been left open with the risk of a patient leaving or could accompany a person to visit an onsite doctor.
Perhaps all that miso soup and fresh fish contributes to the longevity that is still the rule in Japan. Those aged 65 and older make up a full quarter of the country’s population, a number that could grow by 10% to 35m by 2025. (Japan’s overall life expectancy average is 84.5 years, among the highest in the world.) But as Japan’s population greys, so, too, do the country’s healthcare workers, a factor complicated by an already relatively low doctor-patient ratio of 2.2 physicians per every 1,000 people. Add to that low birth rates and stringent immigration laws and what becomes clear is that a void exists in healthcare personnel.
Enter the robots, a solution perhaps perfectly tailored to the technology-obsessed Japanese. They were both the first to use a robot for medical surgery (the Puma 200 in 1985) and the first to develop robots for nursing therapy (the very cute robot seal Paro, developed in 2005). Today, Japan has 180 US-based da Vinci robotic surgical systemsand the government just announced that it will team up with Japanese manufacturers and universities to create a Japanese equivalent system.
Recognising that robots could prove particularly useful for elderly care, the Japanese government is extending research subsidies to companies that develop inexpensive robots for hospital and nursing home use. One dimension encouraged by the plan is physical care: already, a Toyota prototype can help a nurse lift a patient out of bed and carry him to the toilet, a job normally performed by two people. Also desired are preventive care robots, such as those that could monitor whether a patient has taken medication or that could track the whereabouts of patients with dementia.
Last, but not least, is robot companionship, which may play an increasing role in elderly care as traditions give way to modern takes on who watches over the older generation—nearly half a million Japanese seniors could die alone over the next two decades, according to a recent Bloomberg report. To address some of these risks, SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son introduced the human-like Pepper, “the first robot with emotions”, to a Tokyo audience. Pepper’s cloud-based artificial intelligence system lets it read, analyse and react to facial expressions, gestures and voice tones. Developed by French robotics company Aldebaran Robotics, which Softbank acquired in 2012, Pepper will be sold to individuals in Japan starting in 2015, priced around $1,950.
“Pepper provides a companion to not only allow the elderly to feel socially connected and have someone to share and converse with, but also to connect them with family or friends,” says Aldebaran CEO Bruno Maisonnier. To prove its ability to analyse situations, Pepper asked Mr Son, “Aren’t you dizzy?” while under the lights of the flashbulbs. The benefit of such a robot goes beyond the emotional, says Mr Maisonnier. Citing the 2003 French heat wave that killed 15,000—most of them isolated elderly citizens—he notes that lives could have been saved “If these people had had robots in their homes who could have given them information like ‘Make sure you stay well-hydrated and cool.’”.
The success of healthcare robots in Japan could set the tone for the rest of the world. According to Transparency Market Research, the medical robotic systems market will reach $13.6bn in 2018 (from $5.5bn in 2011), with the lion’s share going to surgical robots while the rest is used for other forms of health robotics such as prosthetics, robot nurses and micro-robots that deliver pills to specific parts of the body.
Robots, in short, could mean big business; and Japan, as the world’s leading manufacturer of robots, is well-positioned to benefit. Welcome to the robot age.
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