Aging Japan Looks to Bots For Care

An anonymous reader writes to mention a Yahoo! news article about robotics in Japan. While many research bots are working on interacting with their environment, some of Japan's commercial robotics are focusing on building bots for elderly care. From the article: "The 100-kilogram (220-pound) robot can also distinguish eight different kinds of smells, can tell which direction a voice is coming from and uses powers of sight to follow a human face. 'In the future, we would like to develop a capacity to detect a human's health condition through his breath,' Mukai said. Japan is bracing for a major increase in needs for elderly care due to a declining birth rate and a population that is among the world's longest living." That sure sounds familiar.

Comments

The robot has a home page

[KNicolson]

He's called RI-MAN, Robot Interacting with huMAN. No word on his pushing or shoving capabilities, vis-a-vis a stair-rich environment.

Re:No money in this research

[Anonymous Coward]

your explanation about Dr. Mukai's name is wrong.

here's Dr. Mukais' webpage, and as you see the his name in Kanji, he is "Muka" "i". The leteral meaning is "approaching" and "well"(water hole). There are many theories about the actual meaning.

http://www.bmc.riken.jp/~tosh/index.html

Re:Looking for an article

[jbarham]

You're probably thinking of this article.

Re:No money in this research

[patio11]

Oh, the Japanese government is quite happy to throw LOTS of money at this problem. We're spending a couple million of it two floors below me as we speak. If you're ever find yourself in Gifu, drop by and we'll arrange for a demonstration (although, in fairness, the private industry bots kick our tail in every possible way -- my memory is getting a little rusty but I think it was the Honda bot that had our department head very vexed about after he saw it at the Aichi Expo). Our researchers are throwing most of their time at the hardware (cameras, mainly) and image processing algorithms/challenges.

www.softopia.or.jp , although I don't think you'll find anything interesting about this project in specific if you can't read Japanese. But, anyhow, just trust me, How To Deal With Our Aging Society gets mentioned often enough in seminars here that you'd think it was Dilbertized like "business synergy paradigm" or something.

Re:Avoid the parents.

[patio11]

Lifestyles and the changing family structure is one part of the consideration... the other is just plain old demographics. Japan is aging, fast. The birthrate is slowing to a crawl. I don't have a copy of the powerpoint slide on me (saw it at our research meeting last week, I work for the gov't here and a lot of the research involves "how to equip society to deal with a lot of aged folks", including a portion of our robot research) at the second but the Ministry of Health & Welfare forcasts 1 out of every 3 Japanese to be over the age of 65 by either 2020 or 2050.

There is no way you can make one-to-one care work at that proportion. Japan is currently experimenting with a variety of methods for alleviating this: the current profusion of old folks homes, for example, breaks the traditional one-caretaker-who-is-probably-a-daughter-or-inlaw- per-elderly paradigm. Then there are bots and immigration. I guess I benefit rather directly from policies which encourage the later :) But in the end its going to have to be a confluence of efforts.

Of course, this problem on the societal scale is closely related to the low birthrate (Japan hovers at something like, off the top of my head, 1.1). Yeah. Combine that with an average life expectancy which is the highest in the world and increases every year and demographics sure look like destiny.