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| Residents follow Zora’s instructions during a physical therapy class. (Regy van den Brand) |
They aren’t
on Snapchat. They aren’t livestreaming their adventures on Periscope and
Meerkat. And they definitely won’t be recording 360 videos from drones.
Yet for
residents of Vughterstede — average age 87 — technology isn’t just the bastion
of the young. When they gather for a physical therapy class, the senior
citizens follow instructions from a 22-inch humanoid robot that can move, speak
and dance.
The robot
is positioned on a table and demonstrates different exercises, which the
residents then try to mimic. A human instructor is present too, and provides
individual instruction to anyone needing extra attention.
The chief
executive of the nursing home, Tinie Kardol, happens to also be a professor of
gerontology at the Free University Brussels. One of his students tipped him off
to Zora the robot. Kardol saw an opportunity to improve his own operation and
introduced it a year ago.
By then the
Belgian makers of Zora had been tinkering on the robot for three years. The
QBMT software developers first bought a Nao robot from Aldebaran, a French
company, imagining they’d configure it to work as a hotel clerk. Instead they
have found a market in health care. First a Belgian hospital inquired about
using a robot to demonstrate exercises to children rehabilitating from
surgeries.
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A
Vughterstede resident holds Zora the
robot. Chief executive Tinie Kardol says
he’s been surprised at how his residents
have embraced Zora. (Regy van den
Brand)
|
Kardol says
now over 6,000 elderly people are in direct contact with a humanoid robot in
Belgium, France and the Netherlands. One program lets Belgian children at
school chat with the elderly by typing on computers in their classrooms. The
robot, located in nursing homes miles away, speaks the text. Its eyes light up
green as a cue that it’s the senior citizens’ turn to talk.
The Zora
robot is also being used in hospitals and one psychiatric institution.
“A lot of
elderly people are actually feeling alone. Solitude is something which is
horrible for the moment for a lot of elderly people,” said Fabrice Goffin, one
of Zora’s creators. “People don’t have all the time to visit their families and
they can find some kind of relationship with the robot and that is a nice thing
to do.”
At Kardol’s
nursing home, the robot spends most of its time in a common area. It reads out
weather forecasts and news articles. It’s programmed so that a staff member can
type instructions for what to say on a computer.
In some
cases, the robot has been able to accomplish what humans can’t. Kardol told me
of one resident who hadn’t spoken in four months. One day late last year she
was sitting in the common area next to her son. The staff used the robot to
address her by name and ask how she was doing.
“I’m well,”
she blurted out, surprising everyone in attendance. They then carried on a
brief conversation. Interactions like that have motivated Kardol as a
researcher to investigate why the robot can trigger positive reactions from
those who struggle to communicate.
To others,
the appearance of robots in nursing homes might be a sad commentary on how we
treat the elderly. Will we all one day let our loved ones be entertained by
machines, while we go about our busy lives? And will robots ever replace the
humans in nursing homes, once they can do the job at a lower price?
Kardol is
adamant that Zora isn’t replacing the role of human contact, or humans’ jobs at
his retirement home. But as robots inevitably become more capable, and more
retirement homes consider using them, it remains to be seen exactly what role
robots will play.
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