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Originally Posted by genuinegirly
Robotics and geriatric care. Hmmm. Wouldn't have thought of combining the two.
The number of in-home care givers that can physically pick up the one they're caring for is probably quite low. I fail to see how this would decrease human interaction. After all, someone needs to control the movements of the robot.
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Plus it's a safety thing too...if a caregiver drops a 90-year-old woman with osteoporosis, they'll be dealing with broken bones. Seems to me a robot is less likely to drop a patient.
But I see what you're getting at, tippler. Traditionally, the elderly have been cared for by their children, but now people are "too busy" and they stick Mom in a home.
Oh, and birth rates in the United States are not declining--they've been holding steady at replacement rates for some time now. A woman's TFR (total fertility rate) in the United States is 2.1 (no, a woman cannot have half a child, but the decimal point accounts for stillbirths and other complications wherein a child is born but does not live). The problem is not that we don't have enough young people in the United States to care for these people (this is a problem elsewhere in the world, such as in Europe and Japan, where the population is aging); the problem is that our society is much more associational than communal, and people just don't care about their elders any more. They don't see it as their obligation--the prevailing attitude in our society is that people should be able to take care of themselves. Unfortunately, not all people in a society are capable of being independent.
One of the other interesting side effects of the aging population in Europe is a low tolerance for children, so it goes both ways.