One Nurse Instead of Two

Allison Okamura runs a robotics lab at Stanford, and when she is asked where robots could matter most, she picks the care of older adults. Then she says the part the humanoid companies rarely do. A general-purpose robot doing that work in someone's home is, in her view, several decades away at least, because the safety is not there yet. A robot's mistake happens in the physical world, and there is no taking it back.

What she points to instead is smaller. Getting someone who cannot stand on their own from the bed into a wheelchair takes two trained nurses rolling, tucking and lifting. Her lab's soft vine robot can grow a sheet underneath the person, so one nurse can do it, or a family caregiver at home. She expects simple robots like this to start helping people at home within a few years.

That is the order a family would choose too. Not a machine that can do everything, but one that does the morning transfer without anyone getting hurt. The robot worth waiting for is the one that does one hard thing well.