A Deposit Page Is Not a Caregiver

The guide does the math the marketing skips. NEO costs $20,000 outright or $499 a month, which reads like a bargain next to $7,000-a-month memory care, until you notice the robot runs about four hours per charge, hits maybe 60 to 70 percent autonomy, and needs a human operator for anything hard. Then comes the list of what actually sends a family toward a facility: bathing, toileting, catching a fall, managing medication, the overnight hours. A home humanoid does none of it. Randee Waters, who spent years in ER and orthopedics work, lays facility-triggering tasks beside robot capabilities in a plain table, and the gap is the whole story. Her framing of the price pitch is the honest one: "The math is real. The conclusion most articles draw from it isn't." This is the line Tugboat keeps returning to: availability is not capability, and a deposit page is not a caregiver. The robots may buy a mobile, cognitively intact senior some extra independence and a little less isolation. That is a real, modest good. It is also nowhere near the thing the price comparison implies you are buying.