The Other Twenty

Bloomberg's September segment asks whether humanoid robots can help with the elder care crisis. Gopi Shah Goda of Brookings puts the human work in view. In their analysis of the 2018 Health and Retirement Study, Jonathan Gruber and Kathleen McGarry estimate about 24 home-care helpers for every 100 Americans age 65 and older, 20 informal and 3.7 formal. Informal includes unpaid helpers and paid relatives. Formal means paid nonrelatives. These estimates cover help with daily activities and exclude care provided to nursing-home residents. For Americans 85 and older, the same table estimates about 62 helpers for every 100 people, 49 of them informal.

The robots in the segment are being shown in care communities or doing household chores. Andromeda's Abi leads tai chi and takes song requests at a memory care community once a week. 1X's NEO moves objects and answers the door, and the company's head of product and design is candid that lifting someone from bed or walking them to the bathroom needs safety limits "that we're just not at yet as an industry."

The finding worth keeping is one Goda cites from Japan. Researchers at Stanford, Notre Dame and the University of Tokyo found that nursing homes that adopted robots employed and kept more care workers, not fewer. Goda's reading is that the technology "may allow a less experienced worker to be more skilled at their job."

The other twenty deserve that same attention, including the family members and friends caring without a paycheck. A daughter three weeks into caring for her father is the least experienced worker in the system, with no supervisor and no shift change. The technology that helps her first is the kind that hands her what an experienced care manager already knows. Worldwide, the WHO projects 2.1 billion people aged 60 and older by 2050. Most of that work will stay human for a long time.

Source note. Gruber and McGarry, Long-term Care in the United States, Table 16. The 2018 estimates are 23.7 helpers in total per 100 people age 65 or older, rounded to 24 above. Daily activities means activities of daily living and instrumental activities of daily living, such as bathing, dressing, shopping and taking medications as prescribed.