TECHNOLOGY & SOFTWARE
THE CARE HOME ROBOT DEBATE
Are robots the future of social care? And in what ways can technology in general prove useful in care homes, asks Liam Mynes from Tork manufacturer Essity.
A recent study carried out at Notre Dame University in the US revealed that robots can play an important role in care homes.
According to the Indiana study, robots can remove the physical strain associated with certain jobs and allow care workers to focus on tasks that are better suited to humans.
Machines can also enhance employee retention rates while improving productivity and leading to a higher quality of care into the bargain.
The word seems to be spreading, too. Over recent years there has been an increasing focus on introducing robots into care homes to plug the staffing gap and cope with an ever-ageing population.
However, some studies reveal that care robots can actually add to the workload of staff.
An AI specialist and visiting professor at London’s Queen Mary University Dr James Wright spent seven months observing care home robots.
He discovered that staff were having to spend a great deal of their working day on cleaning and recharging the machines as well as troubleshooting when they went wrong.
And he noted that aſter several weeks, the care workers in the study began using the robots less and less having decided they were more trouble than they were worth.
So, how are today’s care home robots developing? Do the advantages currently outweigh the drawbacks, and will they improve to become more useful in the future?
Robots can fulfil a number of functions in the care home. For example, the ‘Hug’ machine – developed some years ago in Japan – can relieve staff members of much of the heavy liſting by helping residents up from chairs and moving them from A to B. But critics have claimed the Hug is too heavy and cumbersome to wheel from room to room, and is only able to comfortably liſt a small percentage of residents in any case.
Another robot developed in Japan is Paro, which takes the form of a fluffy seal. This is designed to act as a companion to lonely care home residents. However, studies have shown that some residents can become so attached to Paro that they refuse to eat meals or go to bed without it, leading to distress and anxiety.
A third robot, Pepper, was first introduced to care homes in order to run recreational exercise sessions. This machine plays upbeat music and demonstrates simple upper-body exercises for residents to follow.
But the number of routines on offer is said to be fairly limited which leads to residents quickly becoming bored. Others would
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only join in if a member of staff did so as well, which effectively turned the robot into an expensive music player.
However, one area in which robots – and technology in general – is proving particularly useful is in the cleaning sector. Automated systems can now take on the most onerous cleaning tasks, freeing up staff to tackle more detailed work.
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