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Inside Japan’s long experiment in automating eldercare | MIT Technology Review

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It’s a picture you may have seen before: a large white robot with a cute teddy bear face cradling a smiling woman in its arms. Images of Robear, a prototype lifting robot, have been reproduced endlessly. They still hold a prominent position in Google Image search results for “care robot.” The photos seem designed to evoke a sense of how far robots have come—and how we might be able to rely on them in the near future to help care for others. But devices such as Robear, which was developed in Japan in 2015, have yet to be normalized in care facilities or private homes. Why haven’t they taken off? The answer tells us something about the limitations of techno-solutionism and the urgent need to rethink our approach to care. Japan has been developing robots to care for older people for over two decades, with public and private investment accelerating markedly in the 2010s. By 2018, the national government alone had spent well in excess of $300 million funding research and development for suc

Inside Japan’s long experiment in automating eldercare | MIT Technology Review Skip to Content It’s a picture you may have seen before: a large white robot with a cute teddy bear face cradling a smiling woman in its arms. Images of Robear, a prototype lifting robot, have been reproduced endlessly. They still hold a prominent position in Google Image search results for “care robot.” The photos seem designed to evoke a sense of how far robots have come—and how we might be able to rely on them in the near future to help care for others. But devices such as Robear, which was developed in Japan in

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