Development and Dissemination of Nursing Robots and Support Systems for Welfare Sites

The Japanese population is rapidly aging, with fewer proportion of children, and its production-age population has decreased correspondingly, with a resulting shortage in nursing-care service providers. To cope with this situation, the Japanese government has focused on developing and deploying nursing-care robots to compensate for the shortage of human resources. As most nursing-care services are intended for the elderly and disabled, they are traditionally considered as human services. To implement nursing-care robots on a large scale, numerous approaches and measures have been considered, such as modeling the approaches to effectively use nursing-care robots in nursing-care fields, rewarding highly useful nursing-care robots with greater nursing-care compensations, and responding to consultations at nursing-care sites by building a platform to develop, demonstrate, and deploy nursing-care robots. However, nursing-care services using robots are still not popular because of prevailing anxieties about and resistance to such technologies; therefore, the promotion of nursing-care services using robot technologies remains a challenge. Presently, a system capable of supporting not only a single nursing-care scenario but also a series of nursing-care operations is highly desired. In the future, nursing-care services have to be made more rewarding using robots, for which it is vitally important to provide support in the form of evidence-based, scientific, and effective nursing-care services.