At the Umegaoka Long Term Care Health Facility in Yokohama, Japan dementia patients are been given furry, snow white colored robotic seals. The elderly patients pet the seals, and brush its hair giving them a task which they can easily perform and feel a sense of self worth. The seal is called Paro and its only task is to give love and emotional support to patients who may not even remember their own names on certain days.

Scientific studies have shown that robots can indeed make great care takers for the elderly who essentially are looking for some company or something useful to do to pass their time. If the robot can play a game of chess, or help them move about with greater ease, it is aiding in this purpose. This is why scientists are working all over the world to provide more useful medically sound robots.

The ongoing science project to make robots a larger part of healing and therapy  in Japan comes from the fact that the populations is increasing and the number of care givers currently available in the workforce are unable to keep up with the number of existing patients. Robots who can be trained in healing will be able to take considerable pressure off these care givers.

A whole new profession is coming up thanks to all the science experiments being done to make robots more intelligent. At the Socially Intelligent Machines Lab in Georgia Tech there is a teacher who teaches a one of a kind student, a robot! Andrea Thomas is helping to train a robot nicknamed Curi, who incidentally has light up ears.

Andrea’s lab is working on possible personal robots who will have to learn to navigate through the human world without much aid or direction. So they are working on robots being able to ask the right questions and collect the right information to answer these questions.

It could be something quite as mundane as Curi scooping pasta in the kitchen from the cooking pan to the plate, or something more complex like identifying a book and bringing it to Andrea from another room. Once a task has been conducted successfully the robot is then asked to repeat it and reinforce what new things Curi picked up.

The science project sort of like training a child, but in this case the robot does not have to relearn a task that has been perfected once. Andrea also studies how people respond to robots and how they interact together. This gives her more information to perfect her algorithms.

These days robots are being created to do a number of menial tasks which can be hazardous, repetitive and tiring for human beings to perform. Scientists working on robots for the future envision making them actual companions and care givers to humans. It would be a boon to know that your eighty year old aunt is being constantly monitored by a personal robot who ensure that she is served her meals on time, takes her correct medication periodically, and even goes off for a constitutional walk each morning.

All this can become a reality in the future when robots are able to function with greater autonomy. However today when you look at a life like robot that looks like a person but doesn’t have the same fluency of movement and speech that you would expect from a real person, how do you feel? A scientific study will be able to shed more light on this aspect soon.

In most cases people feel equally drawn and repelled by robots that look like humans. This affection and aversion is caused by the way our brain processes what we see. It looks like a person but does not act and speak like a person, so there is an error in what is perceived. While we are aware that its a robot on a conscious level at an inner level we have not truly processed this detail leading to the mixed reaction

Just as your real mother takes care of you, this electronic version is supposed to monitor your actions and give you feedback for your well being. Sen.se have come up with what they call the most user friendly monitoring system which makes dumb things around the house smart. In fact they call it “Mother”!

In order to use this tracking technology people need to place sensors on regular, everyday items such as your toothbrush, the coffee pot, or even a water bottle. These sensors called cookies measure motion with accelerometers, temperature with thermometers, and relay all the information they record via WiFi to the central Mother unit.

Now the sensor on the toothbrush ensures that you brush your teeth properly, and in case you did not the information is displayed on the app which reads like a daily newspaper. It will give you headlines saying that you drank too much coffee or did not have enough water to meet your daily water intake.

In short the science project will let you know exactly how your daily habits are affecting your health. Just like what mother used to do when you were small. So how many of your would like to volunteer for an electronic mother to take care of you?!