When the Robot Burns the Toast

Online tour
Everything is online these days from events to corporate meetings to product demos. Toyota Research Institute offered one: a 36-minute Robotics Virtual Open House, which put on display what Toyota is doing with kitchen robotics for the elderly and handicapped.

Truthfully, I was disappointed.

Now, I was coming at the open house with a gigantic bias: I’m a caregiver for my elderly parents. Well, I was a caregiver until my mother and father passed. But for a long while, I was like the 48 million other caregivers in the U.S. who toil in the aid of a family member. Free services that the U.S. government says equal $480 billion annually.

My heart goes out to all the other caregivers anywhere in the world. It’s a tough, exhausting, unrelenting job.

My caregiver workday—before my paid workday—began at 7AM daily in my parents’ kitchen with my father suffering from Alzheimer’s and my mother from end-stage Parkinson’s.

At the TRI online tour, Toyota’s kitchen was pretty thin on tools to help the elderly and handicapped.

I fully understand that from CEO Gil Pratt down Toyota is staffed by caring and brilliant engineers who sincerely want to create the robotics that will make for better lives for all the needy ones.

But, looking at TRI’s kitchen with a huge, awkward-looking robot moving around in it, I said to myself: “What are they thinking?”

All my elderly parents needed was the coffee maker, microwave, toaster, refrigerator, and please help me to get to the bathroom. That’s it. All else can be handled, with some effort, but it can be handled.

Washing clothes. We don’t need a robot. Forget it. Pile the dirty laundry in a bag, have it picked up, washed, folded and returned. A year-long contract isn’t going to break the bank. Dishwasher isn’t necessary either. Elderly use few dishes daily to make starting the dishwasher worthwhile. Besides, hand washing a few things daily is good exercise for an old person’s hands, fingers, arms and wrists.

Stovetop? Forget it as well. Way too risky. Have family members over on the weekend to prepare a week’s worth of meals for the microwave.

TRI’s website says that they are: “Developing robotics capabilities to amplify and augment human abilities.”

I didn’t see it.

TRI says it interviewed lots of elderly and handicapped people to glean ideas and needs. Again, I didn’t see it realized in any tech gear beyond a gawky-looking giant robot.

Another obvious thing that looks like it might have been overlooked was input from kitchen appliance makers, who are experts in the space. I think a meetup between TRI’s engineers and those from GE Appliances should be in order, if it hasn’t happened already. GE has an awesome new line of refrigerators which might well be capable of automation for the elderly and handicapped.

After screening the video and reflecting on what I had witnessed, it dawned on me that TRI is not alone in what I perceived as missteps in trying to build “robotics capabilities to amplify and augment” the diminished capabilities of the elderly and handicapped.