Will Machines Have Good Bedside Manners?

Louise Mathews of Thousand Oaks, California, already had a hectic schedule. She kept close track of her five adult children and their families while also volunteering as the office manager for her husband’s CPA firm and helping to run the women’s organization at her local church.

But when her mother, Glenna Hancock, began suffering the debilitating effects of Parkinson’s disease, Mathews didn’t hesitate to offer her home. Hancock moved in with her 63-year-old daughter five years ago. Since then, Hancock has regressed from being able to feed herself, dress herself, and take care of her own hygiene to being unable to do any of those things.

“I can’t go anywhere without paying somebody to care for my mom,” Mathews told LifeZette. “I can’t go to work without paying somebody. I can’t go to the market without paying somebody.”

If Mathews pays an agency to help care for Hancock, the workers usually charge between $19 and $25 per hour. That’s about $150 per day — and more than $30,000 per year. Hancock’s Medicare and Social Security help out, and Mathews’ siblings pitch in, but none of that comes close to covering the actual cost of hiring someone to care for Hancock when Mathews needs to leave the house.

The burden of constant caregiving weighs on Mathews. “It’s hard, but at the same time, it’s a gift,” she said. “Every day I wake up selfish, and every day I have to get over it again. That’s what it’s like for me as the primary caregiver.”

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New technology on the horizon, however, could lighten some of this load. Professor Nadia Thalmann, director of the Institute of Media Innovation at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, released a new brand of humanoid robot recently that she hopes will someday help people with both elder care and childcare.

This robot, named Nadine, can interact in real-time and respond with positive and negative emotions. “She” mimics simple body language and gestures and possesses short-term memory for conversations. She makes eye contact, and has basic face recognition software that allows her to remember people.

Thalmann admits Nadine is still a long way away from being able to care for the elderly. “Nadine is still in the development stage. She is more a prototype that proves concepts and what could be done in a more industrial way in the future,” Thalmann told LifeZette. “She needs more development to be able to live with people with special needs.”

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But that is the end goal. “Social robots like Nadine can really support people with dementia and other problems. Nadine is a kind of personal social worker when nobody is there.” Added Thalman, “She is not supposed to replace people. She is dedicated to help them when nobody else is there.”

This could prove especially important in the post-baby boomer society, in which a shrinking work force makes the ideal one-on-one scenario for elderly care less and less likely.

Mathews, however, is skeptical. “I don’t think it would work,” she said of the technology. “There’s so much human intuition that goes into reading nonverbal cues and understanding human needs.”

In other words, how could a robot know when to change the sheets or help someone with hygiene?

Dr. H. Chad Lane, professor of educational psychology at the University of Illinois, has spent his career researching how artificial intelligence and virtual reality can help in education. He admits robotics has a long way to go.

“We’re so far away from anything you might see in the movies,” he told LifeZette.

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“Gaze — where we look during a conversation — is difficult to program in a computer,” Lane added. “Having a computer understand where to look when speaking, all of those little details that would invite patients to open up to their care provider, are a long way off. We currently have very impoverished models of that.”

But working with a specialized set of conditions also makes the robots a little easier to program. Robots are being used in research situations with autistic children to help them develop social skills. These children are often more comfortable practicing their social skills with robots than they are with humans. Caregivers can then help the children transfer those social skills when they interact with peers.

Dr. Lane also notes these robots are usually the natural outgrowth of what is already taking place in a world awash with technology. “You probably use Siri or the Google equivalent,” he said. “That is a form of social interaction. You see people making jokes and asking questions, taking social tendencies and applying them to a machine.”

These robots are meant to augment the work force ultimately, not replace employees. “Replacing humans is the movie version. The reality is there are not enough teachers, not enough doctors, not enough caregivers. How can we make sure technologies are meeting human needs?” said Lane.

Thalmann and her associates are building robots that are meant to be social companions for children; these robots should cost less than $1,000 each. It will take at least three more years before this robot is available for market, she estimates.

Mathews views these developments with optimism: “Maybe for the early stages of dementia, a robot could be a good thing —if the cost was right,” she said.