“Participatory design with the people and organisations who will be using the technology is critical to the way we are developing robots to support older adults in the future,” said Dr Praminda Caleb-Solly who is leading the new Bristol Robotic Laboratory (BRL) project. “All of our work is centred on a deep understanding of the needs of people so that we shape the technology to respond appropriately.”

The new space, on the site of the University of the West of England (UWE Bristol) campus, has been designed to resemble a typical single level home comprising an open-plan living, dining and kitchen area and a bathroom and bedroom.

It’s fitted with a network of wireless sensors linked to a Smart Home Controller Hub, wi-fi cameras and an ADSL connection. The team are using the sensor data to detect patterns of activity in the house to build adaptable algorithms that can be adapted to each person’s lifestyle to support independent living.

Sensor data is sent to a Cloud server and also processed locally, enabling a robot to react if something untoward happens, such as an elderly person not eating when they need to before taking medication.

Perhaps most importantly, the apartment comes with a telepresence robot that enables remote monitoring and an alert can also be sent to a carer who can then try and contact the person, via phone or text message. If there is no response from the person then the carer could activate the telepresence robot and see if there is a problem.

“If the person has had a fall or a heart attack for example appropriate emergency assistance can be deployed immediately and if they are able to, they can be reassured by the carer remotely while help arrives,” explains Caleb-Solly. “This technology could avoid expensive triggering of emergency services when they are not needed but also ensures that they are deployed faster if necessary.”

Elderly people have been recruited to help the lab scientists assess their work and the facility has been sponsored by The Anchor Society which supports elderly, frail and isolated people in Bristol. How do older people respond to an automated machine asking them if they want to play a game? What happens when Molly, the robot carer, talks to someone who has dementia? These are vital questions, and the new lab hopes that asking them in a real-life situation will improve their work.

Other European robot living labs

Robot populated living labs are springing up around Europe. The UK’s University of Hertfordshire even boasts a robot house, an ordinary semi with some extraordinary inhabitants.

Bought by University robotics professor Kerstin Dautenhahn 10 years ago in order to observe how ordinary people get along with machines in everyday life, the house is home to two prototype “care robots” – Care-O-Bot and Sunflower.

”When we first started investigating robots as home companions we had a proper lab, but we realised people felt very uncomfortable,” Prof Dautenhahn told the BBC. “They felt observed and studied… so, we moved into a more realistic environment where people feel more at home.”

The university also uses the environment to research robots such as Kasper, designed to interact with children with special needs.

But “Living Lab’s” are not a new concept. One of the first such facilities was Georgia Tech’s “Aware Home”, which dates back to 2008  This provided a testing environment for  care bots EL-E and PR2.

Particularly where they need to have contact with elderly users in their home environment which may be complex, unstructured and difficult for robots to navigate, living labs are proving a prerequisite.

European funded projects

The European Commission is funding a number of research, innovation and development activities for service robotics in assisted living environments:

GrowMeUp project: development of a self-training robot. Having begun in February 2015, this project seeks to develop a robot that is able to learn from older people’s routines and habits, enhancing and adapting its functionality so that it can compensate, for instance, for the gradual deterioration of cognitive ability. Trials with more than 60 elderly users are are planned by two end user organisations in the Netherlands and Portugal over the course of six months.

Accompany project: a robot companion for the elderly.
This project, now completed, developed a “social robot” using state of the art service platform Care-O-bot® 3 within a smart-home environment. Three interaction scenarios were developed and evaluated by elderly people and their carers in France, the Netherlands and the UK.
The project also drafted an ethical framework for care robotics stressing the autonomy of the user and their freedom to make their own choices.

Robot-Era project: integrating robotic services in an intelligent environment.
Robots to support independent living work in real life conditions with elderly people (and other robots) in Italy and Sweden. Trialled services include: taking the elderly person out shopping or to the pharmacy, reminding them to take their medicine, taking out the rubbish, monitoring their safety by alerting them if the front door is open or if there is a gas leak.

DOMEO project: the Kompaï robot
DOMEO, which finished in 2012, claims to be the first project to bring assistant robots into real homes with real people during the course of a year. The aim was to enable people to live at home for as long as possible thanks to the system’s internet access and dedicated applications.
Kompaï was developed by the French company Robosoft and tested by potential users there. It’s has now been absorbed by the recently launched Mario project, which aims to help those with dementia through the use of service robots.

Rich Walker, Managing Director, The Shadow Robot Company

The Shadow Robot Company has been perfecting its robot hands for almost two decades, but it took just a short demo by the world’s first robot chef last month to propel this small, London-based startup into the global limelight. Despite the chef’s obvious attractions, Robohub’s Adriana Hamacher wanted to delve deeper: to discover what future robot hands have in the manipulator market and why they could soon turn up in a strawberry patch.

With his waist-length dreadlocks and goatee, Rich Walker certainly stands out at the funding and robo-business events, where I’ve often bumped into him. His workshop is just down the road from my house, so when the robot chef was unveiled at Hannover Messe last month, cooking up a storm for the world’s media, it seemed like a good time to pay Rich a visit.

Despite its prowess at making crab bisque, it’s fair to say that the robot chef is defined by its highly sophisticated manipulators – the “Dexterous Hands” in which Shadow specialises.

But the project is actually a collaboration between Shadow and Moley Robotics, the company funding the venture. Last year, in order to fulfil his vision of creating a chef replicator, Moley’s Russian-born founder, scientist and engineer Mark Oleynik, went on the hunt for a company to build the hands for his robot kitchen. He found there was a fairly short list, and it really only came down to one company: Shadow.

“What we built was almost a classic piece of industrial automation,” says Rich, taking up the story. “It’s a couple of robot arms with tooling on the end to be able to interact with a set of well-defined, fixed objects and perform a complex procedure with them. It just happens they’re in a kitchen, the tooling is a pair of fully human-like robot hands and the procedure they’re performing is cooking a crab bisque – it takes 26 minutes. The things you start with are not nuts and bolts and metal flanges, they’re chopped garlic and chicken stock, and the end result is a bowl of soup, plated up exactly as a chef would do it.

“And it’s worth noting that every single person in this company now knows how to cook a crab bisque, because we’ve seen it done seven million times!”

Masterchef winner Tim Anderson, preparing crab bisque. Source: Moley Robotics

The now infamous crab bisque recipe was prepared copying the exact movements of 2011 BBC MasterChef winner Tim Anderson. The robot switches on a hob, scrapes butter into the pan and adds prepared and measured ingredients – from a specific place on the worktop. But, it doesn’t do the chopping… That, says Rich, is an AI problem.

For Rich, corner cutting or finding ways around the problem is second nature, as becomes increasingly obvious in our conversation. Not only is he able to solve problems, he’s also able to turn them to his advantage. Rich believes that supermarkets will want to supply ingredients for the robot kitchen – at a cost, of course – and it’s already becoming common to see chopped salad, vegetables and meat on a shop’s shelves.

Even without the chopping there’s still a lot to do, to get the chef ready by 2017 and by far the biggest challenge is that something like this has never been done before.

“Nobody has built a mass manufacturable humanoid hand,” says Rich. “We have to go from making a small number a year, for state-of-the-art research to something we could have a factory producing in large numbers. So that’s the longest arch of the project, the critical path.”

The robot chef in action. Source: Moley Robotics

The team is also looking at equipment options and trying to keep costs down. But there’s no denying that at around £10,000 ($14,000) – the robot chef will have a hefty price tag, although it’s effectively a complete kitchen, comprising an integrated oven, hob, dishwasher and sink. The market for consumer and office robots is predicted to  grow at a CAGR of 17% between 2014 and 2019, seven times faster than the market for manufacturing robots, so does Shadow’s boss think it’s an area ripe for disruption?

“It’s interesting that domestic robotics has been the thing that inspires people,” says Rich. “But there’s never been anything above the level of the vacuum cleaner. Part of the reason for this is that, when you talk about unstructured environments, homes are about as unstructured as you can imagine. They’re full of random things, things are never where anybody left them, there are small animals running around, there are children, there’s jam – all kinds of things that are really difficult for a robot to see, interact with and understand. And it’s very hard to paint a white line around it and say ‘nobody cross that white line while the robot’s running.’ A factory’s actually a really nice clean, safe, structured environment, when compared with a domestic one.

“Frankly, we’re still a long way from solving the really big problems there. The kitchen is interesting because, there, we’ve constrained it down and said: ‘we’re going to put this robot in the kitchen, above the kitchen, as part of the kitchen; it’s going to be part of the equipment, not wandering around the house. It doesn’t have to find things, it doesn’t have to avoid people, it’s just either the robot is running, in which case the kitchen is closed, or the kitchen is open and the robot is tucked away. So that’s a fantastic simplification, it kind of eliminates all the real challenges of robots in the home.”

“Nobody has built a mass manufacturable humanoid hand. We have to go from making a small number a year, for state-of-the-art research, to something we could have a factory producing in large numbers”

Rich Walker started off as a computer scientist and joined Shadow in 1989 to write software for robots, but he discovered the robots needed building first. He now leads the company, having taken over from founder and non-executive director Richard Greenhill. In the early days, in the mid-90’s, Shadow were primarily working on biped robots and soft pneumatic muscles, but it became apparent that things weren’t working out.

“Bipeds are, I hesitate to say, useless,” says Rich cautiously. “It’s very hard to see an application for a biped that’s commercially viable at any point in the next 10 years. Twenty years ago even more so, because you just need so much infrastructure and ecosystem and capability to make it worth having a hugely expensive biped robot that is risky and might fall over.”

So, they put their heads together and the concept of the human hand came up. That was nearly twenty years ago. So why has it taken them so long?

The Dexterous Hand. Source: The Shadow Robot Company

“We’ve been looking around at ways to get additional resources,” explains Rich. Shadow has become adroit at not only slotting its technology into the supply chain, but also fitting it into funding schemes in both the UK and the EU.

Some of the first applications for their hand included assistive technology. But, fifteen years ago, most of the other elements necessary – for the hand to be able to see, to navigate, to interact with objects and to communicate – were simply not there, which was a big problem.

Recently, Shadow has revisited this space; it’s involved in a European project, RAMCIP, building an assistive robot for people with mild cognitive impairment. With advanced infrastructure, it’s now possible to enable a mobile robot, with a hand, to navigate via 3D mapping, to sense people’s emotions and handle objects. No one calls them crazy anymore.

Applications in manufacturing are looking equally attractive, with the possibility of integrating the Dexterous Hand in a new generation of lightweight, relatively mobile, flexible and safe factory robots. The price point works too, as it’s comparable to the two-year fully loaded labour cost of an employee on a factory line.

“There’s a lot of people with automation type problems who are solving them by having humans do the work,” says Rich, “because you can’t get a traditional robot to do them. But this next generation, of flexible, dexterous, manipulation capable robots, should be able to make an impact on that.”

With both the domestic and industrial markets to consider, you’d think Shadow would have its hands full (pardon the pun), but there’s another sector beckoning too.

“If you can pick the fruit then all the other things can be improved and adapted, but today, there are no machines that you can use in the UK to pick fruit.”

Shadow’s business model is opportunistic in that the company looks for strong partners who have problems and European or UK funding calls to provide the finance to solve those issues. The big challenges are addressed, largely, with EU funding. For shorter term, more commercially focussed or more manageable problem areas, they target government agencies such as Innovate UK, assuming the partner organisation is UK-based.

A recent example is a joint Innovate UK and Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council-funded agri-tech project the company is involved in, AUTOPIC. Led by the UK’s Harper Adams University, the project consortium includes BerryWorld, which  is the leading supplier of berries to UK supermarkets.

Modern strawberry trestles. Source: AUTOPIC Consortium

As might be expected, BerryWorld suffers from seasonal labour issues. The company is also very open to new technology. It’s already using innovative techniques that involve raising the growing area so that the strawberries are now waist height and rest on substrates instead of soil. Rich believes that this is a game changer; it’s opened the door to automatic harvesting.

“We actually focused on the commercial step changes,”he says. “If you can pick the fruit then all the other things can be improved and adapted, but today, there are no machines that you can use in the UK to pick fruit.”

He believes that previous solutions have over complicated the process. “They’ve been very interested in problems like: ‘how do you see the berry in a complex space?’ The whole research challenge.”

But modern day farming means that strawberry trestles are now managed in such a way that it should be – not easy – but more possible for a robot hand to access the fruit:

“The leaves are raised up so they’re out of the way and the berries hang down so they’re very, very visible. The challenges are getting to the less accessible fruit at the back, not damaging the plant and not colliding with things, while doing it all at speed – picking a strawberry every four or five seconds – to have a chance of being commercially viable.”

The system must also only pick grade one fruit, because, unlike apples, for instance, strawberries won’t ripen after they’re picked.

There’s an impressive amount of technology involved in Shadow’s hand: 20 motors, 26 micro-controllers, 24 movements and 129 sensors. So, just how close is it to a real human one?

“We’ve managed to capture almost all of the interesting capabilities,” says Rich.  “Human joints have a property of dislocating and relocating and we don’t do that. The human hand, because of the way the bones run through the palm, can do this kind of wrapping and curling activity. What we do on our robot hand is just a finger bend that comes up to oppose the thumb, rather than a natural wrapping and curling. But, other than that, we think we’ve pretty much captured all of the detail of the way the human hand works. We haven’t yet got anything like the sensitivity of human skin and finger tip sensing. I think it’s going to be another decade before you have all-over high resolution sensing. But, in terms of the mechanical movement and operations, we seem to have about the same sensitivity, the same precision and better repeatability, because it’s a robot. We haven’t found any manipulation task that, if we could program it, we couldn’t use it so for.”

What stands out from talking to Rich is just how multidisciplinary the work Shadow does is; it’s not just about the hands, the software, the hardware, 3D navigation and AI, it’s about supply chains, dealing with chefs, users and funding bodies. How would Rich advise a young start-up to approach all the work that needs to be done to get something like this off the ground?

The Dexterous Hand. Source: The Shadow Robot Company

“We’ve already done robot kitchens so find a different problem,” he quips. “There is a lovely concept that you get taught in business school: it’s the cycle of resources and the cycle of constraints. You say: ‘I want to do something, what have I got to make available to me? How well do I understand the problem I’m trying to solve?’ If you don’t have enough resources, there are two things you can do. You can either go out and raise money, bringing partners in, developing technologies… or you can iterate on a loop of understanding the constraints and refining them around the problem. That means saying things like: ‘suppose the ingredients are supplied in package form, so that we don’t have to chop them. Is that feasible? Yeah, great. So, we’ll do that.’

“So you simultaneously increase the amount of capability that you have and decrease the problem, until you hit the sweet spot, where you say: ‘I have enough resources and the problem is well enough constrained.’ It’s iterating on those two loops that gets you from: ‘I have an idea and I’m going to need £100 million to do it and I don’t know who the customer is,’ to: ‘I can see all the customers, I’ve actually met most of them, the problem is well constrained, I only need two external partners, I know who they are and I’ve got some funding to execute the project.’ It’s all achievable and everyone we need is in the room.”

He makes it sound so easy. But anyone who’s attempted to build a robot of any complexity will know that it’s not. However, it is possible, and the robot chef, with his hands that were nearly twenty years in the making, is testament to that.

If you liked this article, you may also be interested in:

• 2015 sees mobile manipulators coming to market
• Governmental funding of strategic robotic projects
• OpenBionics prosthetic hands: Open source, affordable, lightweight, anthropomorphic
• DARPA’s HAPTIX project hopes to provide prosthetic hands with sense of touch
• Grasping objects in a way that is suitable for manipulation

See all the latest robotics news on Robohub, or sign up for our weekly newsletter.

Games, sensors and robots are among the tools beginning to come to market to help aging people live in their homes as long as possible.

In December, 2003, BusinessWeek Magazine interviewed Joseph Engelberger, the robotics pioneer. The article was entitled “How Robots Lost Their Way.” Included in the article was a plea for money to build an eldercare robot which Engelberger thought could be built with then-current technologies, rented for $600 per month, operated at a cost of $1.25 per hour (compared to healthcare homeworkers who cost around $15 per hour) and developed at a cost of less than $700,000.

“The robot I’m working on will be two-armed, mobile, sensate, and articulate. It doesn’t need to communicate a great deal to meet the needs of an 85-year-old. A human can ask: “What’s for lunch?” and the robot can respond with what it’s able to make, or it can say: “We’re going to Johnny’s,” or “We just had lunch.” The voice recognition, behavioral systems and artificial intelligence necessary to do this are ready. Most of the other technologies are, too. We don’t need more navigation development — getting around an apartment is easier than moving through a hospital or on Mars, which robots do now. I could prove this functionality with the right partner for about $700,000 in 14 months or less.”

I phoned him and started a many-day conversation on the subject. He was a fun character to talk with and I learned much in the process. But when we got to the part where I offered him the money he said he needed, he said, “No. I don’t want your money. You’re just an investor. I want money and partnerships with Panasonic (NYSE:PC), or Johnson & Johnson (NYSE:JNJ), Philips (NYSE:PHG) or Siemens (NYSE:SI); they’re in the business [healthcare products], have deep pockets, and have what I need for the robot to be successful: [1] design and manufacturing capability and [2] marketing experience in the health and eldercare marketplace.”

Nine years later Engelberger’s eldercare visions are still a work in progress in research labs around the world. Products are emerging but very slowly and their solutions are not as broad-based and flexible as Joe imagined. Most are single-purposed and not for home use; and none are produced by the companies Engelberger mentioned. Panasonic (NYSE:PC) has a line of robotic hospital devices; Johnson & Johnson (NYSE:JNJ) discontinued their iBot stair-climbing wheelchair; Honda (NYSE:HMC) and Toyota (NYSE:TM) showcase their walking research robots but other than robotic lawn mowers (Honda) don’t have any robots available for purchase.

Although recent European studies indicate that there is resistance to having elderly people minded by a robot, when given the choice of robotic care versus moving into a care facility, the resistance disappears. Another study from GA Tech showed that seniors preferred robotic help for household chores but not for personal needs like help getting dressed, bathing, etc. This knowledge – and the spreading aging demographics of Japan, the US and other countries, is propelling research into home healthcare robots such as the one which appeared in the movie Robot & Frank earlier this year. The many stakeholders in robotic healthcare (family members and caregivers; healthcare providers; technology providers; aging or disabled individuals) all have similar goals: to provide independence, preserve dignity, empower those with special needs and provide peace of mind to all of the stakeholders.

Every major robotics university and research lab has some form of healthcare and quality of life research including home care robots: GA Tech has Cody; CMU has HERB; the Fraunhofer Institute has Care-O-Bot, Yale, USC and MIT are running a NSF-funded Socially Assistive Robotics project; CIR and KAIST in Korea have their own robot projects, etc. Nevertheless, the multi-purposed home healthcare robot Joe Engelberger envisioned back in 2003 still hasn’t emerged – and specifically hasn’t surfaced from any of the major home healthcare providers. Instead, present-day strategy appears to be to provide high-cost, high-need, single-purpose devices, spun off from university research, and marketed to hospitals and rehabilitation facilities, and wait until the technology develops further – or the political climate changes dramatically – before releasing Engelberger-style lower-cost, more capable, multi-purposed robots designed to be affordable and mass produced by the likes of Panasonic, Siemens and Philips, for home use.

Why are there so few products released and why aren’t there any fully capable devices like Engelberger described? I asked roboticist and blogger Travis Deyle who was a member of the Healthcare Robotics Lab at GA Tech while working on his PhD. Hizook, Travis’ blog, is a site that provides robotics news for academics and professionals:

“There are easier markets than eldercare. To build a viable home robot requires significant expertise in a number of sub-fields, which naturally opens doors to other markets that are easier to monetize. Consider Kinect, Siri, IMUs (inertial measurement units with accelerometers and gyros), photo mapping like Google Maps, etc. We’ve seen MAJOR industries and products pop up around each of these. Why focus on building an integrated system when there’s so much fertile ground in these other markets?”

“The political climate in the US just isn’t committed to robot healthcare solutions — at least not in a reasonable proportion compared to defense robots. Just imagine a DARPA robotics challenge for healthcare robots. Instead of BigDog, we could have Service Dogs; instead of PetMan, we could have an in-home helper; instead of soldier extraction, we could have robotic nurses. Sure, DARPA’s current challenges will ultimately help advance all of these, but why not tackle it head on? The saddest part – real healthcare robot advances (like Johnson & Johnson’s old iBot wheelchair) are discontinued due to burdensome regulatory environments. Half of Mr. Engleberger’s $700,000 could be eaten up by consumer safety certifications.”

“Scaling up from prototype to a mass-produced eldercare product is massively expensive. It’s possible to build a prototype home healthcare robot for $700,000. But investor confidence in the business plan and subsequent funding is often more significant than the actual technology. Consider Rethink Robotics. Sure, they’re making strides in mass-production of low-cost robots, but their real innovation is discovering a VC-appealing business model to make it happen. And even then Rethink required more than $60 million to get over the initial hump. Even Kiva (an arguably less-complex robot) required $33 Million in VC funding to scale up before the Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN) acquisition. There’s just no way to bring such a robot to market for under $700k at this time. Engelberger hedged this by saying he wanted a deep-pocketed partner to burden the production, inventory, marketing, and distribution. And that doesn’t even address the hardest part: software.” (See below for a outline of the software considerations.)

The eldercare/healthcare marketplace isn’t limited to robotic solutions. In fact, there are many competing propositions. Here are a few that come to mind:

• Convenient apps on PCs and tablets like GrandCare and QuietCare
• Home robots like iRobot’s (NASDAQ:IRBT) vacuums and bathroom and kitchen floor cleaners
• Multi-sensored kiosks or stations for health monitoring (taking blood pressure, measuring body temperature, heartbeat rate and pulse oximetry, listening for heartbeat irregularities, etc.)
• Fully-sensored and high-bandwidth houses (Cisco (NASDAQ:CSCO) and Intel (NASDAQ:INTC) Labs)
• Multiple and single tasked mobile robots to detect people lying on the floor, remind them about taking their medications, provide remote video and audio for caregivers and medical personnel, act as a security robot in the night to detect intrusions, fire and smoke and to call for help, etc.
• Remote listening stations and dispatch centers
• Combinations of all of these schemes

RobotDalen projects: left to right: Giraff, Bestic and Zoom

Governmental and other agencies, particularly in countries with socialized medical systems [countries without insurance providers] such as Sweden and Denmark, have stepped in to develop necessary devices where healthcare consumer product companies have yet to tread. For example, RobotDalen, a Swedish public-private consortium has funded the development of needed robotic products such as Bestic, an eating device for those who cannot feed themselves; Giraff, a remote-controlled mobile robot with a camera and monitor providing remote assistance and security; TrainiTest a rehabilitation robot that measures and evaluates the capacity of muscles and then sets the resistance in the robot to adapt to the users individual training needs; and Zoom, an all-terrain, battery-powered four-wheeler intended for people who have difficulty walking. Once fully developed, Zoom will be able to drive up stairs and steeper terrain in a manner that is safe and secure for the driver.

Hector and friend.

Another public-private partnership is the EU-funded $10 million CompanionAble Project which created a robotic assistant for the elderly called Hector. The project integrates Hector to work collaboratively with a smart home and remote control center to provide the most comprehensive and cost efficient support for older people living at home. Although Hector doesn’t have any arms, he does have storage space for drinks, keys, and other items and his communication skills have been honed to work intuitive and effectively with seniors. Needed legislation and ethical considerations are also addressed in this very comprehensive P-P project. The four year project, in the final stages of field trials in Holland and Belgium, is now seeking multi-year funding to extend their research before commercialization.

“CompanionAble addresses the issues of social inclusion and homecare of persons suffering from chronic cognitive disabilities prevalent among the increasing European older population. A participative and inclusive co-design and scenario validation approach drives CompanionAble involving care recipients and their close carers as well as the wider stakeholders. This is to ensure end-to-end systemic viability, flexibility, modularity and affordability as well as a focus on overall care support governance and integration with quality of experience issues such as dignity-privacy-security preserving responsibilities fully considered.”

In the U.S., funding from the NSF has been focused on concept development projects like the Socially Assistive Robotics project referenced above, and university quality of life projects. Very few have reached the stage where commercialization is warranted.

From left: InTouch Health’s RP-VITA remote presence robot; VGo in pediatric out-patient setting; new Double Robotics Double device.

Remote presence robots, which didn’t exist when Engelberger talked with BusinessWeek, have recently turned up in a variety of forms — from simple Skype video chats on a mobility platform (Double Robotics) to serious medical assistance remote presence robots such as provided by the partnership between iRobot (NASDAQ:IRBT) and InTouch Health , Giraffe (shown above) and VGo Communications‘ post-op pediatric at-home robots for communication with parents, nurses, doctors and patients. Remote devices with the ability to carry things, similar to Hector (shown above), may be the next breakthrough followed by adding a single arm and a repertoire of tasks which that arm can perform and then, later dual arms and app stores full of programs the robot can follow.

Entrepreneurial activity in the eldercare space is very limited. Hoaloha Robotics, which is in the stealth phase of their development, may have the chops to bring a product to market. Tandy Trower, CEO and Founder, who previously served as the founder and General Manager of the Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT) robotics group that created Microsoft Robotics Developer Studio, outlined the design plans for his eldercare robot:

“Beginning with features and functions already commonly included in today’s personal computers and adding autonomous mobility and a few additional components with innovative applications and a human-centric interface design, the Hoaloha design will not only take existing PC experiences directly to the user –wherever they are – , but also open up new ways for individuals to stay connected, informed, and entertained while improving safety and access to remote services.”

“The Hoaloha application framework will also provide integration of discrete technological solutions like biometric devices, remote doctor visits, monitoring and emergency call services, medication dispensers, on-line services, and the increasing number of other products and applications already emerging for the assistive care market.”

“In addition, because the design is also based on wireless PC technology, the Hoaloha solution will provide a bridge to the existing digital and Web-enabled world.”

“Finally, at the heart of the Hoaloha design is its ”human-centric” user interface. Designed to leverage and integrate natural interface modalities like speech, vision, and touch technologies, its interface is designed to be socially interactive and easy to use.”

One can only hope, and, like Joe Engelberger, be a bit frustrated with the slow progress thus far.