Is it safe to leave the elderly under the care of robots? This question has been asked countless times, and there has never been a concrete answer. It is still a very heavily debated topic, and a New York Times article titled “Would You Let a Robot Take Care of Your Mother?” does an outstanding job outlining the advantages and disadvantages.
The author starts off with a touching example of a 92-year old lady living in an assisted living facility. She started out alright, but over time, she began to feel bored and lonely. Therefore, her daughter needed to find a solution: a robotic cat. When her two private aids were incapable of providing a sense of companionship like a daughter or pet, they would bring her the cat. This leads into an important point about what a robot should be capable of. The robot did not even remotely try to take care of the lady; instead, its sole purpose was to boost the morale of someone living a very routine life.
Outsiders looking at this would say that the woman’s daughter just did not care enough about her mother to spend time with her, but at the same time, it is incredibly challenging for someone with a full-time job to set aside time every two to three days to spend a few hours at an assisted living facility. The robotic companion was the perfect solution because it is readily available at any point in time and left the caretakers available to do much more important tasks.
This is a very niche example, but there are tens of millions of elderly people living in assisted living and nursing facilities. On average, there are two nurses and around four aids responsible for taking care of upwards of 20 patients over an eight-hour shift. Even if they spent every second of the eight hours with the patients, there would still be about four hours where the patients are completely alone. There used to be a concept of common rooms or activity spaces where the patients could go when they did not want to be alone, but with the current pandemic, contact between patients and aids is extremely limited due to a goal to limit the transmission of the virus.
Learning robots are the perfect solution because over time, depending on how advanced they are, they can adapt to become the perfect companion for the elderly. They can learn to become more energetic and run around more or just sit down next to the person and let him/her pet it. They do not carry any life-threatening responsibility like distributing medicine or ambulating the patient, so there is no risk of death if there was to be any sort of malfunction.
This leads into another aspect of elder care where there is room for improvement: caretaking in general. The author thinks that it is unsafe to leave a person in the hands of a robot for important aspects of life such as food, medicine, water, and ambulation. However, according to Jason Walker, the CEO of Waypoint Robotics, robots are becoming ever-more advanced every year. Instead of having a robotic companion to keep an elderly patient entertained, the robotic companion should be capable of taking vitals and retrieving small objects for the patient, including their medicine or something to drink.
Contrary to the New York Times piece mentioned above, Walker is a strong advocate for the future of robotics. Granted, he is the CEO of a robotics firm so there is some bias, so therefore, he believes that more advanced robotic aids will benefit the elderly and nursing facilities because it not only reduces the number of workers needed at a given point in time, but also reduces the amount of physical labor required from the health care workers. It is very safe because these robots have been tried and tested for decades and will go through thousands of more hours of testing and improvement before they even test out a prototype with the elderly. Waypoint especially is focusing on robots to facilitate ambulation, one of the most difficult parts of being a worker in a facility. If even that aspect of elderly life is taken care of and automated, the average of 7 workers per elderly person over 85 will drop down to about 4.
With only 4 workers being responsible to take care of each person, the other 3 are going to be able to do other important jobs within a facility instead of focusing on taking care of one individual patient. They can work on activities to boost the spirits of the patients. They can give each person more focused help. They can even just stay and talk for a little bit longer than normal to each patient and establish a connection, giving the patients things to look forward to during the day.
The main disadvantage can be if the robot begins malfunctioning and needs repairs. However, there is an incredibly simple solution for this: the facility just has a couple backup robots and has an experienced technician on standby to be able to repair the robots as needed. Even if the robots are learning robots and they need to be swapped, it is very easy to just take out the main board on one robot and swap it into the backup so that it would have the same exact behavior as before the first robot broke.
The other possible issue with having incredibly advanced robots for patients is the upfront cost, but it balances out over time. If there is a patient that requires full time aid, family members buying the robot will ultimately equate to a couple months of around-the-clock aid. The robot is a much more sustainable solution because even when there is no longer any use for it, the owner could very easily sell it and make some of their money back.
There is no concrete solution of whether a robotic caretaker is the better option at this point in time. However, in the future, as humans’ capabilities of robotic development increases, it is going to be the main option in the future.