Robots in Care: a fiction or the future

For most millennials and GenZs, one of the wow moments of the big screen will always be heartfelt on-screen meeting between C-3PO and R2-D2. Qui-Gon brings Artoo to Anakin’s house, and he and Threepio hit it off immediately. Wind forwards to 2020s when AI has been the most talked about subject across the spectrum – would a similar C-3PO or R2-D2 interacting with each other or us, humans be so far-fetched, or a distant reality? 

So, if there is a segment of our lives where such interaction between Infotech and Biotech were to happen – it would be most prudent to be in provisioning of Care. While one could argue application of Robots in many segments from inventory control to stacking the supermarket shelves, the most urgent need is in Care.

The urgency in Care is spawned from realities of today: A rapidly ageing population in the World, acute shortage of nurses and Care staff, danger of the next pandemic hitting hard at a manually-intensive Care home sector and technological breakthrough as a headwind.

Stress in the Care sector:

Ageing is an undesired but unavoidable truth. Just in the UK, around 12.7 million people aged 65 or over in 2022, making up 19% of the population.  The median age of the population is expected to reach 44.5 years by 2050. Coupled with the median age in the World moving upwards, we are living healthier, across Economies in the World. Declining mortality rates mean higher life expectancies. A newborn male baby in the UK today can expect to live for 79.2 years and a girl to 82.9 years, with 22.6% of newborn boys and 28.3% of newborn girls projected to live to 100 years old.

Given the demographic transition happening in the UK and the World, we have seen during and post pandemic how the NHS, and similar Public healthcare sector come under extreme duress. The UK is currently facing a shortage of nurses and carers. According to statistics from January 2020, the NHS workforce gap could reach almost 250,000 by the year 2030. Research by The King's Fund reveals that around 1 in 11 care worker roles are currently unfilled.

UK Government figures say since the beginning of the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic, there were 173,974 deaths of care home residents (wherever the death occurred) in England and Wales, this is an increase of 19.5% compared with the five-year average (145,560 deaths). Refer here.

Advancement in Robotics tech:

As recently as a decade ago, household robots sounded like the stuff of science fiction. However, artificial intelligence has become much more common in the last few years. Around 11% of UK households now own a smart speaker such as Amazon's Alexa. We now have self-driving cars, software virtual assistants, and intelligent conversational interfaces.

Robot, comes from the Czech word meaning forced-labour. Today from cutting grass to vacuuming the carpet and automated machines have been designed (if not forced as the term would translate to) to perform repeatable, mundane tasks and free up human’s time to do more thinking and creative tasks of their day. Similarly in Healthcare, there have been successful deployments of robots in Telepresence – where robots help doctors check-in their patients remotely, surgical robots that aid complex surgeries like knee replacement, working alongside a Surgeon, rehabilitation robots that work with the patient in post surgery recuperation and guiding through physiotherapy.

With the InfoTech advancements – leveraging Cloud and GenAI technologies and BioTech advancements in leveraging robots performing afore said tasks, robots have become more advanced and congenial to human reactions in empathetic way. Robo-acbulary terms this as a Humanoid.

Ameca is one such face of the future of Robotics. Created by EngineerdArts company, Ameca, they rightly claim to be worlds most advanced human shaped robot. Ameca is the perfect Humanoid creation, designed for Human-Robot interactions for a multitude of purposes. Ameca is the combination of AI * AB i.e Artificial human-like Intelligence in an Artificial human-like Body. 3 factors that make Ameca the face of the future is : its modular design (with ability to upgrade remotely), head in the Cloud (self learn capability by linking to GenAI through Cloud) and natural motion (body designed to have movable limbs, face that can mimic a human-like smile and eye ball movements that can detect motion and respond to conversations in a very human-like form). Her ‘brain’ being connected to the Cloud means features such as multi-linguistic, integration to conversational systems and self-learn and self-heal capabilities make it unique.

Meet NEO from 1X technologies, which promises to be an intelligent, everyday assistant. In addition to being a humanoid which can display everyday intelligence, NEO has a body engineered with muscle-like anatomy instead of rigid hydraulics and so, can be as strong and as gentle as we humans are. Standing at 5.41 feet and weighing only 66 pounds, not only NEO has an enviable BMI but has  2.5mph walk speed, 7.5mph run speed and can carry 44pounds weight. Backed by OpenAI, 1X has a vision to create a million strong Robot workforce to help us in our day-to-day needs.

Gazing into the crystal ball:

With Ameca and NEO being just two instances of how tech advancements are in this sector, adoption into an already stressed Care sector is not that distant a reality. Volumetrics that 1X is promising to deliver would make such humanoids more accessible cost wise. Digital interventions in Care and assisted living are areas of experimentation today. In Singapore, the government along with Singapore Management University is working with TCS on an initiative called ShineSeniors which is an innovative way of empowering Seniors to live an independent life - by non intrusive digital monitoring. Such innovations bringing IoT, AI and Data analytics together provide the right platforms to deploy humanoid as the next horizon Care intervention. 

Would the answer for the lack of trained Care professionals and expensive Care home bill foot by the Councils be in making these humanoids more accessible? Answers are consequent to investment in time, effort and experimentation - with collaboration between Academia and Industry. TCS and Heriot-Watt University are partnering under the aegis of the National Robatorium for such advanced Research into robotics and AI. With AI ‘brain’ of such humanoids, the aspects of ethics, explainability, trust and regulatory compliance become key forming blocks to make them mainstay.

If and when this future comes upon us, will humanoids replace Care workers and Nurses? Definitely not. Just to echo what most Futurists say, since the industrial revolution, for every job lost to a machine, atleast one new job gets created. Humanoids surely have a potential to augment, work closely with Care workers, allowing the latter to reinvent how better and more empathetic Care can be given to a growing & ageing demography.