Meet Hal . . . he's here to help

With few immigrant care workers, Japan’s robot industry wants to help look after pensioners

IN STANLEY KUBRICK'S movie classic 2001: A Space Odyssey, the dulcet-toned ship's computer of Discovery One revolts and almost kills off the entire human crew. The story of a computer called Hal reflects a theme that runs through countless fictionalised accounts of our relationships with technology, from Frankensteinto Terminator: fear of the machine. Time and again in Western popular culture, artificial beings created by humans to make our lives easier slip the technological leash, with often deadly consequences.

Not so in Japan. Take the modern Hal, a bionic suit developed by Japanese company Cyberdyne. The Hybrid Assistive Limb is a mechanical exoskeleton that boosts the strength of the wearer. Hal-wearing pensioners can be found on YouTube leaving wheelchairs behind for a stroll around the retirement home. Some hospitals use the suit, which is leased for about €1,400 a month.

“Outside Japan, robots are often depicted as villains,” says Hal inventor Yoshiyuki Sankai, who was inspired to build it after seeing paralysed hospital patients. “But to us, they are friends.”

Hal is just one of many similar innovations Japan’s engineers are churning out, including robots that talk to granny, check her vital signs, analyse her urine, lift her into the bath and help her to walk to the shops. This month, the Riken research institute unveiled the latest mechanical caregiver: a robot that lifts elderly patients off a futon and into a wheelchair. The RIBA-II crouches down and uses smart rubber sensors to calculate the weight of the patient before picking her up.

Riken wants to sell that to the world, once it has been perfected. But many innovations have already arrived on the market. Toy-maker Banzai’s PrimoPuel, which is a sort of comfort toy for the elderly, has sold more than one million units. PrimoPuel demands to be petted, and has internal sensors telling it when it is too hot or cold, and when Christmas and birthdays roll around.

One reason for the boom in robot assistants is that Japan’s population is ageing faster than anywhere else. The country already has more people in need of nursing care than Ireland’s entire population, and by 2015 the figure will have reached 5.7 million. Human caregivers are in desperately short supply and Japan has mostly shunned the solution found in other advanced countries: foreign labour. Why bother employing a Filipino care worker when you can get that robotised alternative, seems to be the common view.

The Economistmagazine is one of many commentators that blame xenophobia. "The consensus among Japanese is that visions of a future in which immigrant workers live harmoniously and unobtrusively in Japan are pure fancy," said the magazine. "Making humanoid robots is clearly the simple and practical way to go."

But Roland Kelts, author of Japanamerica: How Japanese Pop Culture Has Invaded the US, says that Japan's famously complex social etiquette, rather than fear of foreigners, is the subtext of its love of robots.

“Compared to most other cultures, Japan is still extremely codified: You know stuff because you’re Japanese,” he says. “Knowing the codes, when you can be direct, when to be indirect, is very fraught. With a robot, you don’t have that problem. Robots at their root are code, so you can create a robot to suit you.”

Perhaps so, but culture aside, there is another reason Japan has embraced the machine: it is good business. Robotics plays to the country’s strengths in mechanical engineering and computer science, its love of craftsmanship and a well-honed ability to make incremental improvements to advanced technology. The country’s “peace constitutional”, meanwhile, means that the industry’s energies are geared toward civilian and commercial use, unlike in the US where the military rules.

Robots generate 700 billion yen (€6.3 billion) in revenue every year, according to the Japan Robot Association, and already do much of the heavy lifting in factories around the country. With 360,000 of the world’s million industrial robots, Japan dominates the global market. So far, humanoid robots such as Sony’s Qrio and Honda’s Asimo, wheeled out as the public face of Japan’s high-tech economy, have remained expensive toys. This could change, however, with the development of so-called people pleasers: “service partner” and “welfare” robots.

In 2006, the Robot Policy Committee, for example, a body operating under the auspices of the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (Meti) predicted that robots would evolve over the next decade from mainly industrial use to general purpose “consumer types”, capable of performing tasks such as cleaning, nursing and house-sitting. By 2015, the robot market will be worth about 3.1 trillion yen, according to Meti.

Spurned by that huge population of pensioners, private companies are already blazing a trail. Panasonic, for example, like many large manufacturers, is developing robots that transfer elderly people from bed to bath or wheelchair, clean houses and trail their masters around the airport, ferrying luggage.

And it has experimented with a 106-bed retirement home equipped with robot bears to watch over residents. The fur-covered robots, equipped with a local-area connection, observe their elderly charges and ask them occasional questions before warning staff of problems.

Will such innovations ever see the light of day? Whatever happens, Japan will continue transforming malignant images of artificial intelligence into the benign and the useful. Look again at Hal's corporate creator: Cyberdyne, a name borrowed from perhaps the most fearsome robot in popular culture, Terminator.