Slashdot Mirror
Robotic Bubble Baths for Japan's Elderly
LukePieStalker writes "New York Times (open kimono before entering) is carrying an article on various robots that are being used in assisted living situations. In addition to mentioning the Wakamaru, the story has illustrations of a human washing machine and a description of robotic pants that help those with mobility problems. Apparently, the devices are considered the better choice in a country that is not inclined to grant working visas to foreigners. As Japan's population shrinks, will the robot population make up the difference?"
Huh? What's this crap about Japan not issuing work visas? Do I sense some bitter frustration by some otaku who couldn't get a job?
I was offered a job and a work visa in '96 and turned it down, a friend of mine has been over there since '98 on a work visa.
old people being beaten by their caretakers or left to lie in their own excrements for weeks.
My God, dying by being shat on for weeks by your caretakers must be horrible!
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0102812/
First thing I thought of when I saw the story headline. I'm surprised nobody else cited this preniscient work....
``If you meet the criteria of having a 3 or 4 year degree, and a company values you enough to sponsor you, you can get a working visa.''
/Mombukagakusho/ is known in English these days) encourages this. (widely known, but the only proof I can give is that I work for a local government in Japan and my contract changed suddenly a few years ago. Out of the blue, they inserted a five year limit and my boss later told me it was because of a policy note from the min. of edu.) So getting the visa is not really the biggest difficulty.
Don't know much about the business world, but in education, foreigners are generally limited to short term contracts - like a one year contract that can only be renewed two or three times. No raises, no promotions, and every few years you get to go looking for another job. The government (the Ministry of Education, Sports, and Science, as I think
Also, for those that do not know, Japan is facing a serious population decline - like 30 percent or so over the next hundred years. The UN estimates that Japan would need to accept more than 60,000 immigrants each and every year basically forever just to maintain a decent workforce. "Foreigners" are currently about 1.5% of the population. Most of those are "Koreans" who were born and raised in Japan and most of whom speak Japanese as their native language. Immigration on the scale that the UN mentions is just not an option (right now at least) for the Japanese.
The government is considering (forget if the have moved on it yet) allowing in "care givers" from the Philipines and Thailand to take care of all the old people. Deals with the symptom but not the real problem.
--
Osugi Sakae
..It's not like that.. not even nearly.
I'm suspecting the situation there is similar as here in Finland, that the baby boom generation that was born after ww2 is getting old enough to retire, which means that a lot of jobs is going to be freed and the number of elderly people is going to increase quite fast(coupled with increased life expectancy).
It's not that there isn't any children. It's that the population isn't expanding rapidly as it was after ww2. basically what it means that because of the baby boom 50 years ago there's going to be a boom of people retiring in the coming years.
besides, a personal helper is very expensive if the problem is that a person needs just some mobility enchantment(basically the realistic alternative for normal folk being sent to a retirement home and lie drugged out on a bed there till you die - does that sound very good?).
and old people feel better if they can get on by themselfs, in their own homes(granted that they still get to meet other people and generally have some activity in their lives.).
not that they're very protective either, I'd guess you'd need to know the language pretty well to be able to carry out house helper tasks(and be subject to local minimum wage & etc laws. unlike in some certain countries into which foreign manual labour workforce can be brought in very cheaply and then dumped back to where they came from..). getting work visas into japan is far from impossible, but hey, it's slashdot! dramatised shit for nerds!
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
They're working on it. Japanese conference states robots' rules of order
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
Go rent the Wallace and Grommit animation, "The Wrong Trousers", and you will understand.