Technology Rise of the robots


As the population ages and staff shortages continue to bite, will robots be the future for the care home sector? Liam Mynes, healthcare segment manager at Tork manufacturer Essity, looks at various developments in this area and considers how robots – and technology in general – can make a positive contribution to the care home environment


The care home industry is all about delivering that personal touch when interacting with residents. Or is it?


In an ideal world, every resident would


receive meticulous care from staff members plus their undivided attention on those occasions when they feel particularly lonely or vulnerable. But today’s care workers are generally stretched very thinly. In fact, this was the case even before the global epidemic started to bite. The advent of COVID-19 made an already difficult situation a whole lot worse, as many employees fell ill or chose to leave the care profession, leaving facilities more understaffed than ever. As a result, there has been a growing trend to introduce robots into the care home sector to assist with certain key tasks.


Eastern origins The Far East has been consistently ahead of the curve in this regard. Around two decades ago, more than $300m was earmarked for robotic research and development by the Japanese government. As a result, a series of robots have been trialled in that country’s care homes over the intervening years – and these have had mixed levels of success. For example, one such machine – the


‘Hug’ – was designed to be used for the manual job of lifting of residents in order to free up care workers from this onerous task. However, some staff members complained that the act of wheeling Hug from room to room was in itself cumbersome and time-consuming. In any case, only a small percentage of residents were able to be lifted comfortably using the machine, and this led to many facilities ceasing to use the device after just a few days. Another robot that has been pioneered mostly in Japan is ‘Paro’, an automaton in the shape of a seal that aims to provide residents with animal therapy. Paro proved to be fairly successful among the elderly


April 2024 www.thecarehomeenvironment.com


who enjoyed interacting with the fluffy ‘seal’. But according to reports, certain residents have become so attached to Paro that they refuse to eat meals or go to bed without it – and this has led to competition between some people and distress and anxiety on the part of others. A third robot – ‘Pepper’ – was


introduced around 10 years ago in order to run recreational exercise sessions. This humanoid machine had the facility to play upbeat music and demonstrate a series of simple upper-body exercises for residents to follow. However, the number of routines it


offered was fairly limited which meant residents quickly became bored. And others would only join in if a member of staff did so, too – which effectively turned the robot


Despite their obvious potential, care home robots have not yet taken off on a grand scale


into an expensive music player. Pepper robots were actually trialled in the UK in 2020 but instead of being used for exercise purposes, their main aim was to help alleviate loneliness in residential homes while also boosting mental and physical health.


Made by SoftBank Robotics, the machines are able to gather and store information about individual care home residents, allowing them to initiate conversations based on the elderly person’s own interests. And they can also play residents’ favourite music and remind them to take their medication. But the UK trial was short-lived and in 2021, SoftBank announced that production of its Pepper units had been paused after only 27,000 had been made. The pandemic gave rise to a number of other robots in care homes around the world as shortages of human workers and bans on visitors made life difficult for the sector on a global level. Among the most successful of these ‘lockdown robots’ was Grace, a humanoid robot and the brainchild of Hong


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