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Lookup NU author(s): Professor Cathrine Degnen, Professor Katie Brittain
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This chapter considers robotic companionship in later life through a dual lens of critical social gerontology and anthropology. In particular, we examine MARIO “a service robot”, constructed to manage “loneliness, isolation and dementia in older persons” and to promote “active and healthy aging” (http://www.mario-project.eu/portal/) and PARO, “an interactive therapeutic robot in the form of a baby seal”, built to deliver “animal therapy…to patients in environments such as hospitals and extended care facilities where live animals present treatment or logistical difficulties” (http://www.parorobots.com/) , including patients with advanced dementia. Drawing on published literature in applied health and gerontology journals, and on marketing materials for these two robotic companions, we ask what kind of co-becomings are being imagined and constructed here via the ways in which robotics are represented in the care of older people. What sort of economic, political and socio-cultural frameworks are these new technologies embedded in? What aspects of human non-human entanglements are being normalised in the presence of such robotic interventions, and which entanglements are screened out? Three categories of robotic intervention emerge: 1) the caring robotic intervention, one that might be helping health care professionals with monitoring and diagnostic work; 2) the therapeutic robotic intervention, often seen as necessary for patients with dementia who require calming, soothing, and reduced agitation (Moyle 2019); and 3) the social robotic intervention, an emphasis and distinction that care professionals themselves are starting to make in terms of what qualities of the companion are valued (Whelan 2019). Of interest to us here then are a series of nested and interrelated issues to do with what is meant by companionship, by care, and why these robotic interventions are understood to be particularly appropriate and indeed necessary for people with dementia. Do they “connect” people up by creating relational opportunities that might otherwise have shrunk? Do they assume that loneliness can be tackled by replacing relational aspects with a robotic intervention? Or is it that new material objects such as MARIO and PARO which may at first seem odd, unfamiliar and non-relational, by virtue of their very interactive presence in the lifeworlds become transformed into meaningful co-actors?Moyle, Wendy 2019 “The promise of technology in the future of dementia care”. Nature Reviews Neurology 15:353-359. Whelan, Sally 2019 Paper presented at the British Social Gerontology annual meetings, Liverpool, July 2019.
Author(s): Degnen C, Brittain K
Editor(s): Douglas C; Whitehouse A;
Publication type: Book Chapter
Publication status: In Press
Book Title: More-Than-Human Aging: Animals, robots, and care in later life
Year: 2024
Acceptance date: 06/10/2023
Series Title: Global Perspectives on Aging
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
Place Published: New Brunswick, NJ
URL: https://www.rutgersuniversitypress.org/more-than-human-aging/9781978840935/
