Meet your robot caretaker

Imagine waking up on your 92nd birthday four or five decades from now: You need help getting from the bed to the bathroom, medication reminders, someone to make your bed up and it would really help your bum hip if there were someone there to help you stretch it out.

So, you call for Roberta. She s strong enough to help you to the bathroom, and it s not so embarrassing when she cleans you up. She has your medications all organized for you, and you know she s already double-checked them against the database she updates daily. Roberta makes the bed while you take the meds with some juice she s freshly squeezed. As she s helping you get dressed, she reminds you to do that hip-stretching routine.

Roberta does all this with ease, like the well-oiled machine she is. You d expect nothing less from your robot caretaker.

Of course, a person could also do all of this work, and right now, people do. But humans are expensive, even as the job of caring for older people pays poorly. The 2 million home healthcare aides in the United States 90% are women and over 50% are people of color make an average of $12 an hour, a quarter of them live below the federal poverty line, and half rely on public assistance to get by.

via www.washingtonexaminer.com

Hmmm. Might be a plan.