3. Growing role of robotics

Robots have huge potential to improve quality of life in the final years, as explained Tony Prescott, of the University of Sheffield. “The future will be an ecosystem of connected care: robotics, along with telehealth, will provide care at home, in residences and at hospitals. Home is key, people prefer to age in their own surroundings according to our data. People over 65 spend more than 80% of their time at home. This goes up to more than 90% in people over 85,” he highlighted.

Prescott stressed that we must remember that robot care isn’t a substitute for human care. But robots, among other activities, can provide additional physical and social support, help people live longer at home, help the elderly help others or make care-givers more efficient.

“They will also allow these professionals to focus on the more human aspects of their job, creating a profession with more skills and that will allow care-giving to be more enriching. And they will lower the number of cases of injury care-givers suffer as a result of some of the physical aspects of their job. I also think that it will help because there is a shortage of skills-trained professional care-givers,” he summed up.

Finally, he insisted that the robots of the future don’t necessarily have to look human-like, as can be seen in some of the help robots already on the market.

In this field, a new paradigm of ‘soft’ robotics is coming to dominate, explained Cecilia Laschi, of Sant'Anna School of Advanced Studies in Pisa. While the traditional approach to personified intelligence focused on the brain and central processing, the current approach looks to interact with the environment and for cognition to emerge from interaction between the system and its surroundings.³  

“Robotics can make behavior adapt to do its job better: greater safety, efficiency, effectiveness, robustness and flexibility, among other characteristics, doing more than is possible today,” she said.

Plus, the expectations are very promising: sales of service robots between 2016 and 2019, are expected to hit $45 billion. According to the International Federation of Robotics (IFR), over this same period, 1.4 million industrial robots will be installed in factories and an estimated 333,000 service robots will be sold in both manufacturing and non-manufacturing sectors. And 42 million of this type of robot will be sold for personal and domestic use in our private lives.

A més, les expectatives són molt prometedores: s'esperen unes vendes de robots de servei, entre 2016 i 2019, de 45.000 milions de dòlars. Segons la Federació Internacional de Robòtica (IFR), en aquest període s'instal·laran 1,4 milions de robots industrials en fàbriques i es calcula que vendran uns 333.000 robots de servei tant en els sectors de fabricació com en els de no fabricació. I es vendran 42 milions de robots d'aquest tipus per a ús personal i domèstic en les nostres vides privades.