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Can Social Robots Help the Elderly?

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Learn about the how they may be able to assist the elderly with daily tasks.

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By 2030, all of the boomers will be older than 65, according to US 2020 Census Data. By 2035, the number of people ages 85 and older will double, and more than 20% of the world’s population will be over retirement age. By 2034, older adults will outnumber children in population. Additionally, about 70% of people age 65 or older will eventually need some kind of long-term care support.

But who will care for these individuals as they live out their golden years? There is a shortage of in-home care aids and nursing facilities also struggle to remain fully staffed.

Some researchers and advocates for aging people believe that eventually robots may be able to help with caretaking in both a social capacity and also through assistive tasks in the home and in long-term care facilities like assisted living.

Social isolation and loneliness directly impact our health and well-being as well as mortality rates.

A 2020 report by the National Academies Press identified technology like artificial intelligence and social robots as one of the possible solutions to identify and provide support to people who need it.

“Companionship is really important,” says Terry Fulmer, Ph.D., RN, FAAN, the president of The John A. Hartford Foundation, which funds efforts to build an age-friendly healthcare system. “We have found that some [people] really like Alexa and Siri.”

Fulmer does not believe that social robots are a full replacement for human caregivers, but she does believe that they can help relieve some of the burnout that caregivers experience. “Caregivers are in need of… extensions of themselves,” says Fulmer. “It can be a very lonely job.”

Social robots can also act as safeguards for seniors receiving care. “The other thing we have to guard against is elder abuse,” says Fulmer. “We have to be sure that caregivers are looking out for the best interests of older adults.”

Robots aren’t entirely ready to come into the homes of seniors because they need to be taught how to interact with the world. Tucker Hermans, Ph.D., an associate professor at Kahlert School of Computing at the University of Utah explains that even something as simple as grasping an object—which humans learn instinctively—needs to be taught to a robot.

“There’s the object, and then there’s some representation on the grasp,” Hermans says. “Where am I going to put my wrist and how am I going to shape my fingers before I close my hand? … If we learn such a model, we can then use it for planning, where we can maximize the probability of success of grasping at deployment time.”

“I don’t want the robots breaking things, colliding with people, causing safety issues,” says Samuel Olatunji, Ph.D., a postdoctoral research associate at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. “So all of this needs to be researched, as well as just general interaction [questions for the seniors using robots] like are you willing to trust the robot? Would you be willing to accept the robot into your home environment?”

And unlike industrial robots that pick up cars, recycling and other very heavy objects, these robots need to be torque-limited, or unable to exert that much strength, which brings new challenges to tasks like picking people up and transferring them to another part of the room or home.

“The idea is utilizing other assistive devices… together as multiple agents to lift a person and then… take them to a wheelchair or something like that,” says Tapomauykh Bhattacharjee, Ph.D., an assistant professor in the computer science department at Cornell. “That’s one application we have just started working in this area—we have not done any human studies with this, but we have done some studies in our lab with mannequins.”

Robots are also quite expensive. For example, Robot Lab’s BellaBot, which can only serve food and drinks, costs $15,900—and is unlikely to fit into any household budget right now. Although the robots are not ready to be in the home, Olatunji does believe that they could be used in senior care facilities by as early as 2035.

“We just finished a study where we’re exploring the potential of having robots in a retirement community,” says Olatunji. “The robots can move from room to room and… support them with communication, connecting with their loved ones, or helping with physical tasks … or delivering medication [and] food.”

Similar to most innovations, however, robots get cheaper as research advances in sensor technology.

“When I started my Ph.D., I was working on robots that were $400,000 or $200,000 and now we have very similarly capable robots that are orders of magnitude cheaper,” says Bhattacharjee. “Things become cheaper and more affordable.”

Aside from the cost, there are also ethical concerns about bringing advanced social robots into the home.

“I think that there is an ethical dilemma around this, because some older people have dementia, and there is a whole discussion about whether it’s appropriate to use devices,” says Fulmer. “It really means you have to engage the family and talk with them about their philosophy about the use of robots in caregiving.”

There are other questions about data privacy and who has access to data that the robots capture with the sensors they use.

“They’re going to be [capturing] lots of data,” says Olatunji. “Where is this data going to be stored? Who is… going to see this data, who has access to this kind of data?”

The most important part of developing robotics to support senior care is to involve the main stakeholders in the conversation: The people who are actually receiving the care.

“[With] any cutting edge technology, there will be skepticism,” says Bhattacharjee. “Thanks to some of the people [who] I tend to think of… as first explorers or first adopters [who] help us guide this, when it reaches a level of maturity, through their word of mouth, the people in the community start coming to us.”

Olatunji has seen a very positive response from his research participants.

“They are excited,” says Olatunji. “There’s been myths about older adults not really being open to technology, like there’s a lot of technophobia there…. They may not be familiar with it, but they’re open to it.”

Photo courtesy of PeopleImages.com – Yuri A/Shutterstock

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