Robot Carers?
 

I found this online and thought it was a strange thing. Sure, populations are ageing and natality rates are low...is this the future of the elderly? It would make an interesting sci-fi flick. Well I bet someone's made it already. I still think human contact is irreplaceable.

Isn't it strange how, the more ways of communicating we have, the longer we are able to extend our lives, the more we are able to learn, the more we seem to turn away from each other and how truly fragile we are as a whole. I wonder why that is?

This is an interesting video...but it gives me chills.



Official Ri-Man page

Oh, that's what you meant. The Robot Carers thread title threw me. I thought you meant Robot Careers, not Robot Caregivers.

Robotics may be the next real revolution changing our society in a similar way to how the advent of the Internet Age has changed things.

I guess that we could envision things going the way of I, Robot or Wall-E but I suspect that neither is entirely on the mark. I do think that robots will increasingly be constructed to take on tasks either too dangerous (bomb disposal) or too mundane for humans to perform. Automation is nothing new, but the age of the personal robot isn't too far off.

As an aside, the hospital where I work (or rather that my offices reside adjacent to since I don't actually work for the hospital) has implemented a pair of robot carts that run samples and documents between the hospital and the clinical labs. It is about a half-mile walk inside the building complex. The robots have collision avoidance and follow a pre-determined path. They do have the ability to call elevators and select floors. I would guess that they do that via radio frequencies. They aren't that big of a deal to the staff around here, but we do operate in central Kentucky. Some of the patients visiting our hospital are pretty 'backwoodsy'. I wonder what they make of the bots roaming our halls.

/I, for one, welcome our new robot overlords.
//Had to be said in a thread on robots.

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.

I am not programmed to 'care', merely to exterminate all hu-man life. That is, you might say, my career.

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.

Listen, and understand. They're out there. They can't be bargained with. They can't be reasoned with. They don't feel pity, or remorse, or fear. And they absolutely will not stop, ever, until your cares are met.

The elderly have a hard enough time with alienation, isolation, loneliness and depression. Technologies like this have a place, but not at the cost of human interaction.

Actually, the goal of the robot is that no one will have to control it's movements. It has facial recognition (See) and can listen to commands (Hear). A person can be in the living room, and tell the Care-Bot to carry them to bed. The robot would hear a command being giving, move to it's owner/master, pick them up and carry them off to the bed room, or to the bathroom, or the backyard.

Most likely, a family would own one of these while these to help take care of grandma and/or grandpa, or a nursing home would have a few of these to help out. It's possible that someone would want to stay at home, and only have their Care-bot, and the occasional visit from the nurse.

This wouldn't just be for the elderly. Last year when I was apartment hunting, there was a paraplegic guy in his mid-30s offering a free room and a job as his care giving. He just needs help changing his clothes and bathing, so one of these Care-bots would have been perfect for him.