An increasing number of nursing care service facilities have been introducing "communication robots" which have artificial intelligence programs installed and are capable of interacting with people.
Interacting with these type of robots has such effects as giving residents a sense of healing or encouraging them to become more self-reliant.
Also, the robots seem to be helpful for reducing the stress put on employees working in the nursing care facilities.
At the entrance lobby of Sonare Soshigaya-Okura, a nursing home for the elderly in Setagaya Ward, Tokyo, three female residents were joyfully spending time surrounding an Umi-chan, Aibo, which is a dog-shaped robot model from Sony Corp.
One of the residents told the robot, "Umi-chan, please dance." Upon the request from the resident, the robot performed a dance to a nursery rhyme. The women gave a loud applause saying that the robot is so cute.
One of the women, 93, said smiling, "Umi-chan responds properly. It's so smart."
The nursing home introduced the aibo robot in 2018. Shingo Ebihara, head of the nursing home, said, "Among residents here, some love animals and others had kept dogs or cats as pets before moving into this home."
He added: "It's difficult to keep a real animal because we have to pay attention to risks of allergy and infectious diseases, but it is possible to keep one if it is a robot. I assumed that the type of robot would go well with elderly people."
After the introduction of the robot, residents in the home have shown various changes.
Some who had stayed in their rooms for a long time began to come out to the entrance lobby because they wanted to meet Umi-chan, and others who had rarely smiled started to show expressive facial signals.
Ebihara said, "The existence of Umi-chan has motivated each of our residents to live in his or her own style."
He also said that Umi-chan works as a topic of conversation between the residents and workers in the home.
"[The robot] have provided cues for us to find aspects of the residents, which we didn't know before, such as that they had kept pet dogs before. It also helps us provide care and makes our job smoother," Ebihara said.
These types of robots seem to be helpful for not only residents in nursing care homes but also for nursing care workers there.
In January this year, Sompo Care Laviere Komazawa Koen, a nursing home for the elderly in Setagaya Ward, Tokyo, introduced two robots of the Lovot model from Groove X Inc.
The home operator said that the robots have good effects on not only residents but also for its workers as their stresses have been lowered.
The weight of each of the Lovot robots is the same as 1-month-old babies. The main feature of the robots is that their bodies are soft and warm.
Because the robots can move around indoors with their wheels, workers of the home let the robots freely move around on the first floor during daytime.
Residents interact with the robots by stroking their bodies or holding them up. Workers also talk to the robots in intervals during their work time.
Ai Haruta, head of the home, said: "The Lovot robots are like pets also for our employees. They smile more often than before and the atmosphere in this workplace has become brighter. It is beyond our expectations that [the robots] have also helped reduce their stresses."
The Japan Agency for Medical Research and Development, a national research and development entity, conducted a large-scale demonstration experiment about commercially available "communication robots" between August 2016 and March 2017.
The experiment took place in 96 nursing care facilities nationwide mainly about effects from the use of these types of robots.
The results showed that 34% of elderly people receiving nursing care became physically more active and their levels of self-reliance improved after the introduction of the communication robots.
Yayoi Okawa, who took charge of the experiment, said, "Chatting with the robots have a certain degree of effects," but added that there were gaps over how effective they were among facilities that introduced the same type of robots.
"Robots are tools," Okawa added. "To gain expected effects, merely introducing ones is not all. It is necessary for operators of the facilities to firmly consider how to utilize the robots and to make other efforts."
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