By Tola Sargeant
How long will it be before humanoid robot carers, like those in the new BBC comedy Ann Droid, are no longer science fiction? With mounting pressure on the social care system and rapid advances in AI, robot carers could be a reality sooner than you think.
Prime Minister Andy Burnham made ‘fixing social care’ one of his highest priorities when he arrived in Downing Street last month. To stand a chance of succeeding, the government will need to address the rising cost of social care and the well-documented workforce crisis in the UK health and care sector.
Amid rising demand from an aging population, there are tens of thousands of unfilled NHS vacancies, nearly 100,000 daily adult social care job openings, high staff turnover rates, and a heavy reliance on international recruitment.
At the same time, technological advances mean that various forms of AI are already being used to support carers, provide companionship and enable older and disabled people to stay in their own homes for longer, lowering the cost of social care.
Artificial companions
A recent article in The Observer highlighted the case of elderly residents in a care home in Lewisham who have been given Genies – small AI-enabled droids from UK company Cera. Programmed with the individual’s calendar and medical needs, these artificial ‘companions’ can remind residents to take medication, help them make video calls and hold a conversation. The elderly residents report feeling less lonely as a result.
As Professor William Dutton, Oxford Martin Fellow at Global Cyber Security Capacity Centre, University of Oxford, and AIT trustee explains: “In the age of AI, this may not sound very surprising. However, the pioneers of such applications had been thinking about them for decades — none more than Professor Yorick Wilks. Having known him, I found it wonderful to read about artificial companions finally being used in just the ways he and his fellow pioneers imagined and prototyped.”
In the late 1990s, before the advent of Siri and Alexa, Professor Wilks led an EU-funded machine dialogue project called Companions at Sheffield University. Interviewed by Archives of IT in 2019, he said: “I began to write about the idea that, what we needed were computer companions that had dialogue, but it was more than dialogue. They would know about us and be our personal companion.”
The motivation of the original EU project was to be company for old people. Lonely old people, living alone, no one to talk to. They’d rather have a computer to talk to than nothing.
Today, tech from companies like UK scaleup Alcove already offers more than simply companionship. Alcove’s AI-powered IoT software platform connects in-home digital sensors, integrated health devices and advanced analytics to enable proactive alerts, preventing issues like falls, infections and wandering, so that people can safely stay in their own homes for longer.
The future of social care
Asked about the future of social care in her interview with Archives of IT earlier this year, Alcove’s CEO Hellen Bowey was quick to point to robots: “I have genuine belief that the curve that we’re on at the moment will lead us to autonomous robots that can perform lifting and moving to rooms, to reduce the burden on the humans, so the humans can do the stuff that they are brilliant at, the soft stuff.”
In five to ten years, I fully expect autonomous robots to be performing a large function of what social care workers are performing at the moment, removing any of the tedious and manual tasks so that humans can be using their time to perform better, higher value activities.
Hellen is not the only one to think that robots are the answer to workforce shortages in social care. Researchers at Waseda University in Japan have been pioneering the development of humanoid robot caregivers as part of the Sugano Project, with the goal of them being able to act alongside human beings by 2050. AIREC (or AI-driven Robot for Embrace and Care) is already being trained to provide assistance with tasks such as getting out of bed and putting on socks.
It is still early days for AIREC, which has deliberately been made to not look overly human, but it seems highly likely that the not too distant future will bring humanoid robot caregivers. Droids that can quite literally do the heavy lifting, as well as offering some companionship, working alongside humans to offer 24/7 support and free up human carers to do the things they are best at.