What cuddly robots could bring to the care of dementia patients

The other day I was scouring the internet looking for a robot dog. I wanted a belated birthday present for my aunt who had recently been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease. Studies suggest that a companion animal can alleviate some of the loneliness, fear, and anxiety that accompany Alzheimer’s disease. My aunt would like a real dog, but she can’t have one.

That’s how I discovered the Golden Pup, “golden puppy” in German, with his jaunty red scarf from Joy for All. He bobs his head and barks when you talk to him or touch him. And it has a realistic heartbeat. It is one of the many, many robots that have been developed for people with Alzheimer’s and dementia.

Among these robots, Golden Pup is a decidedly low-tech robot. It is already available in stores for $140. The fluffy high-tech baby seal Paro from Japan, which can sense touch, light, sounds, temperature and body position, costs around $6,000. According to the manufacturer, it develops its own character and remembers behaviors that made its owner pay attention to it.

Robots for people with cognitive disorders

Even more sophisticated robots will soon help people with cognitive disorders by using artificial intelligence (AI) to talk to and play games with their owners. For example, researchers at Indiana University Bloomington are optimizing a commercially available robotic system called QT for dementia and Alzheimer’s patients. The approximately 50 centimeter tall robot looks a little like a toddler in an astronaut suit. Its round white head supports a screen on which two eyebrows, two eyes and a mouth can form a variety of facial expressions. The robot engages people in conversations and asks AI-generated questions to get them talking.

The AI ​​model used is not perfect, and the robot’s answers are not perfect either. In an awkward conversation, the robot responded to a study participant’s information that she had a sister with: “I’m sorry. How are you doing?”

But with the improvement of large language models already underway, the quality of conversations will also increase. When the QT robot made this embarrassing remark, it was running OpenAI’s GPT‑3, released in 2020. The latest version of this model, GPT‑4o, released in mid-May, is faster and enables almost seamless conversations. You can pause the conversation and the model will adapt.

The idea of ​​using robots to care for people with dementia is not always an easy sell. Some people see this as a departure from our social responsibility. There are also concerns about privacy. The best robot companions are personalized. You collect information about people’s lives, learn about their likes and dislikes, and figure out when to approach them. This type of data collection can be troubling not only for patients but also for medical staff.

Privacy concerns

Lillian Hung, founder of the Idea Laboratory (Innovation in Dementia and Aging) at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada, told a reporter about an incident that occurred during a focus group at a care facility. She and her colleagues went for a quick lunch. When they returned, they found that the staff had unplugged the robot and placed a bag over its head. “They were worried that he was secretly recording them,” she said.

On the other hand, robots have some advantages over humans when talking to people with dementia. Their attention does not wane. They do not get annoyed or angry when they have to repeat themselves. They cannot be stressed. In addition, there are more and more people with dementia and too few to care for them. In 2021, there were 1.8 million people with dementia aged 40 and over in Germany, and 1.7 million in the age group 65 and over. And the forecasts show increasing numbers: two million affected people (aged 65 and over) in 2030, 2.4 million by 2040.

In the United States, the trend is similar, and this has implications for the caregiver labor market: According to the latest report from the Alzheimer’s Association, more than one million additional caregivers will be needed in the United States between 2021 and 2031 to meet the needs of people with dementia cover. This is the largest gap between supply and demand for a single occupation in the United States.

This gap is already noticeable: patients are often sedated to make it easier to deal with them. They are strapped into wheelchairs and parked in hallways. There are hardly enough nursing staff who can care for the physical needs of people with dementia, let alone provide them with social contact and an enriching environment.

Feeling of belonging

“Caregiving is not just about tending to a person’s physical needs, but also their mind,” writes Kat McGowan in this Wired story about her parents’ dementia and the promise of social robots. “The needs of adults with and without dementia are not all that different: we are all looking for a sense of belonging, for meaning, for self-realization.”

If robots can enrich the lives of people with dementia in the slightest, and if they can provide companionship where there is none, that is a win. “We are currently at a tipping point where it is becoming relatively easy and inexpensive to [kognitiv unterstützende Roboter] to develop and deploy to provide personalized interventions to people with dementia, and many companies are vying to capitalize on this trend,” a team of researchers at the University of California, San Diego wrote in the 2021 Proceedings of We Robot. “However, it is important to carefully consider the implications.”

Many of the more advanced social robots may not be ready yet, but the low-tech Golden Pup robot is already available. My aunt’s illness is progressing quickly, and she occasionally becomes frustrated and agitated. I hope Golden Pup can be a welcome – and calming – distraction. Maybe he will bring joy during what is an incredibly confusing and painful time for my aunt and uncle. Maybe not. A robot puppy is certainly not for everyone. But even though Golden Pup is not a real dog, I hope he can be a friendly companion.

The author of the text is Cassandra Willyard. She is a freelance journalist in the USA. She writes regularly for the US edition of MIT Technology Review, where she covers the field of medicine.