...I am a resident robot at Middlesex University.” Pepper used voice, gesture, and his embedded front tablet to explain about the role robots like him will play in education and healthcare. At Middlesex, final year students in robotics, education, psychology, and biomedicine like Joana Miranda, one of his two escorts, work with Pepper on projects such as developing numeracy skills in primary school students. According to BBC News, Tory MP Lucy Allan dryly noted that Pepper was “better than some of the ministers we have had before us”. In healthcare for older adults, the Pepper robot developed by Softbank is... Continue Reading
Search Results for robots
Connected Health Conference highlights (so far): FCC’s $100 million telehealth pilot, NIH’s ‘All of Us’, MIT’s social robots integrating AI
...goals, the cost will be justified, and whether the data will be kept private as promised. MIT’s social robots may be the future of emotional support for wellbeing. MIT associate professor Cynthia Breazeal heads up the Personal Robots Group and is working on how to integrate AI into emotional robots for pediatric patients at Boston Children’s Hospital. The robots serve as a go-between child life specialists and the patient. The initial results were positive, with higher verbal scores (as a measure of engagement) than with stuffed bears or digital avatars. Professor Breazeal wants to extend the technology to older adults... Continue Reading
CNET spotlights ‘comfort companions’ and therapy robots
CNET, generally a home for all things whiz-bang and techy, is unusually but admirably spotlighting tech that assists the disabled and older adults. The latest in its Tech Enabled series focuses on robotics and AI-assisted comfort companions to help the sick–children undergoing medical treatment and adults with dementia. We’ve previously covered the PARO therapeutic seal, here in use with dementia, PTSD, and TBI residents in a VA Hospital in Livermore, California, It’s now in its 13th year of distribution and on its ninth release. Our prior criticism was only that it could benefit far more people if production were higher... Continue Reading
Japan as aging bellwether: experiential VR, claim that robots increase activity by 50 percent
...in monitoring and connectedness. It’s another look at Palro and Pepper [TTA 24 Oct 17], this time in action at the Flos Higashi-kojiya Senior Care Facility in Tokyo, at a nursing home run by the Social Welfare Corporation of Tokyo Seishinkai, and in a home with an older couple. Robots, as we’ve noted, are stepping in the care and connectedness gap. For older adults living at home by themselves, interactive robots like Pepper can aid with tasks but as you’ll see in the video, the wide-eyed Pepper becomes a ‘daughter-bot’ (left and above from the video) that remarkably increases engagement... Continue Reading
What’s up with Amazon in healthcare? Follow the money. (updated)
...and pharma. To this Editor, this is the most likely and soonest option–the monetization of this data and the delivery of third-party services as well as monitoring. Amazon now employs a lot of people. It is large enough to create its own self-funded health system. It’s already had major problems in the UK, Italy, and even in the US with healthcare and working conditions in its warehouses. Whole Foods’ non-union workers are prime for unionization since the acquisition (and also if, as rumored, robots and automation start replacing people). A self-funded health system may also be plausible to sell like... Continue Reading
Robots, robots at CES: ElliQ, Sophia the ‘humanoid’, companions, pets, butlers, maids…and at a supermarket near you?
[grow_thumb image=”https://telecareaware.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/Overrun-by-Robots1-183×108.jpg” thumb_width=”150″ /]CES as usual was a Robot Showcase, though without the presence of our recent Spotlight Robot Kompaï. One of our other Spotlighters, Intuition Robotics‘ ElliQ companion robot, won the CES Best of Innovation Award in the Smart Home category (release). [grow_thumb image=”https://telecareaware.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/sophia-header.jpg” thumb_width=”100″ /]Much press went to Hanson Robotics’ Sophia, a Frubber-skinned humanoid robot from Hong Kong. It (She?) sees through cameras and sensors, through them recognizes speech and facial expressions, responds through natural language processing, and has a motion control system. It started walking on its own at CES courtesy of DRC-HUBO-developed legs. Its creator David... Continue Reading
Robots, robots, everywhere…even when they’re NHS 111 online algorithms
[grow_thumb image=”https://telecareaware.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/Overrun-by-Robots1-183×108.jpg” thumb_width=”150″ /]The NHS continues to grope its way towards technology adoption, gets slammed–but is it justified? The Daily Telegraph (paywalled–see The Sun) revealed a draft December NHS report that recommended that the NHS 111 urgent non-emergency care line’s “enquiries will be handled by robots within two years.” Moreover, “The evaluation by NHS England says smartphones could become “the primary method of accessing health services,” with almost 16 million inquiries dealt with by algorithms, rather than over the telephone, by 2020.” (That is one-third of demand, with one-quarter by 2019.) Let’s unpack these reported statements. An algorithm is not... Continue Reading
A fistful of topical events
...apply pressure to policymakers and identify appropriate research opportunities. You can sign up for their newsletter here and navigate to more engagement opportunities. The Royal Society of Medicine’s Robocare: the ethical and practical issues of using robots in caregiving on 4th December 2017 will prepare you for the tsunami of care robots shortly to appear on the UK scene. Medical apps: mainstreaming innovation, on 19th April 2018 is the sixth annual mHealth apps event run by the RSM, organised by this editor. It will feature all the key UK participants in the mHealth app world and will take place just... Continue Reading
CES Unveiled’s preview of health tech at CES 2018
...about loss), annual GDP increased by $500bn, and drive a $275bn investment from telecom operators. AI. Society will be impacted by machine learning, neural networks and narrow (e.g. calorie counting, diagnostics) versus general AI (simulation of human intelligence). This affects voice-activated assistants like Echo, Alexa, and Google Home (now owned by 12 percent of the population, CES survey) as well as robotics to ‘read’ us better. These conversations with context may move to relationships with not only these assistants but home robots such as from Mayfield Robotics’ Kuri (which this Editor attempted to interact with on the show floor, to... Continue Reading
Will Japan’s hard lessons on an aging population include those with dementia?
...and care –or be a cautionary tale? Two articles in Canada’s Toronto Star and the Japan Times indicate the struggle and the pressure that dementia has placed on an aging Japanese nation. What makes headlines is an unfortunate 91-year-old man in Obu who wanders onto railway tracks (with the family handed the C$39,000 damage bill), the horrific rundown of pedestrians by a 73-year-old who despite a dementia diagnosis just had his driver’s license renewed, and the violent acts around kaigo jigoku, or “caregiver hell” by both family members and paid carers. This is not readily solvable by robots or Paro... Continue Reading
Most Recent Comments