When we first heard of direct-care workers in the South Bronx, New York, being tracked by GPS, we thought of George Orwell’s “Big Brother.”
But when we spoke to workers and to a manager at Cooperative Home Care Associates, an affiliate of PHI that recently ran a successful pilot test of the system, we decided this was a good use of cell phone technology.
For one month, 16 workers used cell phones given to them by CellTrak Technologies to clock-in on the job instead of calling in from the patient’s house phone.
Talk about robots in long-term care always makes me uneasy. It’s partly suspicion that this is just another way to avoid dealing with the growing direct-care workforce crisis: look, Ma, no workforce! Crisis solved.
But it’s also a reaction to how robot engineers tend to look at direct-care work. Like most people who’ve never done it, they seem to see it as just a series of tasks — lifting, transferring, etc. - that a machine can do at least as well as a person. In fact, most long-term care recipients need more interaction with other living beings, not less. Can a robot provide companionship and comfort? Can a robot form a meaningful relationship?
According to an article in the current issue of the Journal of the American Medical Directors Association (free to subscribers only), the answer to those questions could be “Yes.” For the study, Saint Louis University researchers set up pet therapy visits to nursing homes by two dogs: a real one named Sparky and a robot named AIBO. (Pictured above, in a photo by Grant Crawley, is resident Gladys Moore playing with AIBO.) It took the residents longer to warm up to AIBO than to Sparky, but after eight weeks of visits he did almost as good a job of relieving loneliness and fostering attachments in the people he visited.
An article in the January 7 issue of the Washington Post says a “small army” of robots designed to assist with elder care on display at a recent Tokyo exhibit are being touted as the answer to Japan’s looming demographic crisis. “One such gizmo, on display at the show, can spoon-feed the elderly. Others are being designed to hoist them onto a toilet and phone a nurse when they won’t take their pills,” says “Demographic Crisis, Robotic Cure?”
Japan already has “the world’s largest proportion of residents over 65 and smallest proportion of children under 15,” the article points out, and the marriage and birth rate among young women is low. And, while workers from other countries could fill open slots, political opposition to immigration remains strong.
“There are critics who describe the robot cure for an aging society as little more than high-tech quackery,” the article notes. “They say that robots are a politically expedient palliative that allows politicians and corporate leaders to avoid wrenchingly difficult social issues, such as Japan’s deep-seated aversion to immigration, its chronic shortage of affordable day care and Japanese women’s increasing rejection of motherhood.”
Where you stand on the issue depends on your answer to the rhetorical question asked by a Toyota division manager. “Are you going to let strangers into your home?” he said. “Or do you have robots?”
being tracked by GPS, we thought of George Orwell’s “Big Brother.”
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