Japan is embracing nursing-care robots | Hacker News Reader

Japan is embracing nursing-care robots

economist.com

47 pointslxm19 comments

A lot of Japan's embrace of robots is not so much due to what robots do, but due to what they represent: modernity, luxury, precision, etc.

For a nursing care facility, being able to tout a robot nurse is great for marketing. Whether or not the robot is useful is almost secondary.

It is my understanding that Japan has a horrific birth rate and ratio of elderly to working-age adults, necessitating nursing care robots.

In many Western countries, the answer to these problems has been immigration. However, Japan is famously insular; a prospective immigrant cannot hope to naturalize as a Japanese citizen they way one could in, say, Canada or Germany.

So Japan is otherwise stuck with three options: let the elderly wither and die with little care or dignity, commit a vast portion of Japan’s relatively scarce workforce to take care of its elders, or robots.

Japan picks robots.

I've heard that too but I don't think it makes any kind of sense from a practical point of view, and I suspect it might just be a nice theory. These "nursing care robots" are very far from being able to do even 1/10th of what a normal human worker can.

I don't understand why you excluded immigration as one of those choices.

In fact, nurses have been trickling in from Philippines and elsewhere. This program could be expanded considerably soon, as we have already seen with retail, construction and other sectors.

Many of its firms see great potential in “carerobos” that look after the elderly.

I'm skeptical, and it's not just because of the long history of western news organizations reporting on supposedly transformational public-facing robotic inventions in Japan that fail to pan out (1).

Caring for patients requires several skills that robots cannot handle well, including manual dexterity and interpersonal communication. Yes, these things will surely get better over time but it won't be soon enough for the demographic crisis now facing the nation.

I think the biggest potential for transforming nursing care in Japan and elsewhere lie in technologies and inventions outside of robotics - better drugs, mobility tools and prosthetics, treatments and devices to improve vision and communication, and monitoring systems.

1. https://www.theguardian.com/world/gallery/2009/may/08/1

The types of robots used in Japan are very diverse. HAL Lumbar Support is an assistive device that helps caregivers to lift patients / objects more easily (it is also being tested in other areas such as construction work). Paro is a seal "stuffed animal robot" with minimal sensing and actuation, but it's very cute nonetheless (if you ever visit Tokyo, go to Miraikan in Odaiba, you can touch it there). Pepper (made by a French subsidiary of SoftBank) is a humanoid shaped robot on a wheel base that is mostly good for voice/gesture communication.

Katsuhiro Otomo[1] explored the idea of robots providing elder care in the 1991 animated movie Roujin Z[2].

(for a short overview of the movie and the issues it explores, I recommend this[3] essay by Pause and Select)

[1] most well-known for writing the manga "Akira"

[2] https://myanimelist.net/anime/2000/Roujin_Z

[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ufiv4U_Lczg

The dystopian Halo Ice Cream ad immediately comes to mind: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j4IFNKYmLa8

Children's Hospital Los Angeles is already using VR to help train hospital staff. As automation coupled with new technology increases we will see an increase in the health related verticals adapting to new cutting edge tech. https://latechnews.org/childrens-hospital-la-vr-technology/

So they are already starting to use automation to address the labor shortage from a decreasing population.

This should be the way forward rather than importing foreign populations, because a gradual decrease of human populations is necessary for preserving more our natural resources.

I wonder how the lack of human social interaction will impact the the well being of the ones taken care of.

Might be better than the current state of affairs in which a growing number of elderly die of neglect alone in their homes. Cleanup of these situations is a growth business [1].

[1] https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2010/07/21/national/cleanu...

Sadly, can confirm. I've seen or overheard far far far too many conversations where someone was in pain and neglected, or verbally abused by nurses.

If Im lucky enough to feel old one day, I'll take an impersonal robot over real life versions of online trolls.

I haven't seen how it's handled outside of the US, but I would love some examples of nursing care done right, but it's just a tough situation all around. I wish there were some way to align all of our incentives.

Edit: In relation to the comment, I meant that to mean that neglect is happening in both obvious neglect, but also abandoning people at nursing homes, without realizing that this can take a fragile person's mental state from "holding on" to completely broken.

Javascript paywall? I disabled javascript through the development console and could read the article. Maybe a bit off-topic, but this could be solved better.

Some marketing person probably forced a front-end developer with no back-end permissions to create a paywall on a short timeline.

Rather than make robots, why don't they import millions of folks from Central America to Do The Jobs That The Japanese Won't Do?

SEAsia have Indonesia and the Philippines as their equivalent. They have tried Philippine nurses, but they tend to complain they don't pick up their culture well enough.

Japan also has very strict licensing requirements for certain health professions, most of which require fluency in Japanese.

http://archive.is/z9iUE

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