Imagine you’re 90 years old, a grandmother of three and your husband is also elderly and ailing. You need help with almost everything, getting out of a chair, going to the bathroom, getting dressed, eating and remembering your medications. Despite advances in life expectancy, aging has not been kind, and you feel like a burden to your husband and the healthcare professionals who care for you.
Now, imagine being offered a robot that could help with many of these things – from walking to the bathroom to keeping track of your doctor’s appointments. This robot’s advanced artificial intelligence (AI) learns your preferences, knows your birthday and remembers your name. It sounds wonderful, right? You’d no longer feel like a burden to your spouse or depend on carers to help you shower.
This scenario might seem like the start of a sci-fi movie, but it’s closer to reality than you might think. In Japan, as early as 2018, a survey revealed that older adults living at home would prefer a robot carer over humans. Japan’s “super-ageing” society, where the proportion of older people is growing faster than anywhere else in the world, has put immense pressure on the workforce.
Advances in technology are stepping in to address these challenges, but also present issues for the world’s largest health profession: nurses. Perhaps understandably, the idea of robot nurses raises concerns in a profession built on the concept of “care” that is often associated with human conn.