It has become common today to assume that it is both unsafe and unethical to place the elderly under the care of robots. However, I believe that robots taking care of the elderly is the future. Using robots instead of human aids is both more sustainable and reliable in the long run.
Maggie Johnson from the New York Times believes that it is unethical to put a robot in charge of humans, but she proposed an alternative solution. Her middle ground is a robotic pet or companion that serves as a companion to the patient. She does not believe that it is fair to put a robot in charge of humans because of the fact that the elderly lived their lives and therefore have more dignity than to be subordinate to a robot. The most prominent issue with a robotic aid is the surveillance and manipulation of people that do not know any better.
However, I think the contrary. Robots in elder care are going to be the future because of the reduction of the amount of physical labor required per patient. In a standard assisted living or nursing facility, someone over 85 years old has an average of seven people at a time taking care of him/her, and that does not even include private full-time aids. With a robotic aid that is always with the patient, depending on what the robot is capable of, those seven people constantly working on the patient can be reduced to four.
I agree with Johnson to a certain extent about the value of a robotic companion because elder care facilities can be very depressing environments, but only using a robot to entertain a patient is a waste of resources. Robots are already being developed to medicate patients and take their vital signs. However, in the future, humans are going to be much more capable of developing more advanced sensors and more powerful algorithms to analyze the sensor readings. There are also robots designed to help move patients between their bed and the bathroom for instance. That reduces the need for a human aid to constantly be on standby to assist patients whenever they want to go anywhere.
This concept is heavily addressed by the Jason Walker, the CEO of Waypoint Robotics, when he wrote about the value of robotics in the future. He explains how it is a large adjustment to make, but in the next ten years, our technology is going to be more than capable of taking care of humans. The greatest advantage that he emphasized is future technology being able to detect symptoms of a disease or injury long before a human can recognize them.
Another aspect of robotics for the elderly is going to be artificial intelligence (AI). Robots will progressively improve on their abilities over time. They will get better at detecting whether a patient is in pain using facial recognition with increased accuracy. Initially, there would be a robot designated for the patient that will monitor him/her until it detects some sort of pain then it can alert the staff on duty and they can verify whether the patient is actually experiencing any sort of symptoms. If the flag was true, then the worker would document it and the robot will become more accurate in detecting whether certain facial expressions from the patient are synonymous with that person experiencing pain.
In fact, a companion robot can determine as much as whether a person is sleeping well at night using AI sleep-tracking technology. Such a system would track the user’s motion and the sounds they make over a night and use those to determine how well the person slept. At least at the beginning, there would need to be a learning phase where the person would somehow rate the quality of their sleep so the robot can better interpret the allowed threshold of movement for it to still have been considered a good night’s sleep.
Jeff Rowe, a writer for AI Powered Healthcare, advocates for the use of AI by the elderly. He explains the current options on the market, and I agree with what he says except for the fact that what is currently available is sufficient for the elderly to use. There are great products available today, but everything that exists is purely novel in nature. There is no reliable device that can be trusted with the well-being of a human. The most advanced one now is called the ElliQ, which cannot do much more than just sit on the table and talk. It is capable of reminding the user to take his/her medicine, using text message, and talking to the patient. However, it cannot do any more than that. It is only a promising sign that our future holds more capable, mass-producible robotic solutions for the elderly.
Having a robot take care of the elderly in the future is going to be infinitely more efficient than having human caretakers. They will have the ability to ambulate patients as well as facilitating taking medications and using artificial intelligence to analyze vitals and determine whether the user is feeling any sort of pain or symptoms. It is also more ethical to leave a person under the care of a robot rather than other humans because they are going to receive much more one-on-one care than if they were sharing an aid between six people. It is ultimately more efficient and ethical to use robots to take care of humans than other humans.