Japanese researchers, backed by the government, are working on robots that can care for the elderly:
Covered by five millimeters (0.2 inches) soft silicone, RI-MAN is equipped with sensors that show it a body’s weight and position.
The 100-kilogram (220-pound) robot can also distinguish eight different kinds of smells, can tell which direction a voice is coming from and uses powers of sight to follow a human face.
“In the future, we would like to develop a capacity to detect a human’s health condition through his breath,” Mukai said.
We have mixed feelings about this. In many cases, the job of a home health aide is helping patients on and off commodes, prepping meals, and watching out for falls and accidents. This robot could obviate a lot of that tedium — but given the risk of fractures in elderly patients, it seems like decades before robots could be trusted to do more good than harm.
We can only speculate as to which odors the robot is supposed to detect… With functions like these, how long until the robots resent their roles? We recall that the Terminator’s predecessors started as strong robots with rubber skin…
Flashback: Knight Rider for the Senior Ciruit…
More specs from PinkTentacle…
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