Are Eldercare Robots Ineffective?

Wright points out that the Japanese government, over twenty years beginning roughly in 2000, invested $300 million into robotics for eldercare without significant success. Actually, for a country like Japan with a population rocketing downward, an average of $15 million annually over twenty years is a pittance. Worse is that the number of eldercare robots that were produced over those twenty years has a poor rate of take-up in Japan’s elder homes and residences. Barely 10% of Japan’s 11,000-plus care facilities have and use them.

With some of those 10%, the eldercare robot was used once or twice, then, for a number of reasons, was put in storage. Principal among the shortcomings was that “eldercare robots are difficult to work with and also demand care themselves.”

See related article & podcast episode:
When the Robot Burns the Toast
Kitchen robotics for elderly & handicapped
As Wright puts it in a recent article for MIT’s Technology Review: “The care robots themselves required care: they had to be moved around, maintained, cleaned, booted up, operated, repeatedly explained to residents, constantly monitored during use, and stored away afterward. Indeed, a growing body of evidence from other studies is finding that robots tend to end up creating more work for caregivers.”

Wright’s negative conclusions about eldercare robots are something we have all probably felt in our heart of hearts while looking at eldercare robots ministering to their patients. As a caregiver for many years to my parents, one with Alzheimer’s and the other end-stage Parkinsons, I never met an eldercare robot that I’d ever have entrusted to be near my parents. But, that’s just me.

Critical observations

• Overlooked in the real-world caregiving between eldercare robots and old people is the cultural bond that the Japanese people have with their elderly. It’s a millennia-old bond since the Yayoi brought farming and wet rice with them to the land. Simply, no one dies alone and no one lives alone. Families and extended families live together. A home specifically for the elderly was unheard of and disrespectful. Modern caregivers echoed this tradition.

• Here’s what Wright observed from the caregivers: “They wanted to care with their own hands, which is quite a kind of an ideal in Japan, the idea that you have this kind of touch is an important aspect of providing care. And they said, you know, using robots with older people is kind of disrespectful of them, you know, these are our elders, we should be respecting them and not just moving them around, like a forklift truck moving goods or something.”

• To Wright, there was also a disconnect between engineers developing the robots and the elderly and their care staff. Wright observed that “when some of the people who made these robots went and visited the care home they wouldn’t talk to residents. They weren’t really interested in talking to many of the care staff, and if they did, they only spoke to the male staff. “I just saw so many parallels in the way that the engineers are so disconnected from the end users. Inevitably, you have, therefore, exactly the same problems coming up, which is that the end users, it turns out, aren’t interested in using these technologies, sophisticated technologies, that are then developed without their consultation.”

•  “Another really important thing was the constant communication between care workers and residents. So even if the care worker was brushing the teeth of the resident or lifting them. Through all of the interactions, there’s this constant communication that helps build relationships. Which becomes important when we move on to talking about robots.” Robots would do a better job if they could chat, which seems reasonable enough.

Wright titled his book Robots Won’t Save Japan. However, Japan’s population is tumbling so fast, the country has no choice but for robot-driven automation. To wit: Robots MUST Save Japan!