I have a caring, faithful, selfless friend named Carla who is a volunteer for a non-profit hospice program. Carla’s been working with hospice for years, something I don’t think I could ever do. She is an amazing woman whom I’ve been privileged to call friend for close to 45 years now. I am humbled by her kindness and thoughtfulness and servanthood.
A couple months ago, after a break in her hospice service to take care of some pressing family issues, she returned and was offered an opportunity to work on a hospice program that involved visiting patients and homes (both individual and group homes) with an advanced therapeutic, interactive robot officially called PARO.
PARO is a baby harp seal and was invented in Japan by Dr Takanori Shibata in the early 1990s. Now in its 8th generation, PARO has five kinds of sensors: tactile, light, audition, temperature, and posture sensors, with which it can perceive people and its environment. With the light sensor, PARO can recognize light and dark. PARO has the ability to learn to behave in a way the user prefers, and to respond to its name. Carla’s PARO is named Harper. When Harper interacts with people, she responds as if she is alive, moving her head and legs, opening and closing her eyes, making baby harp seal sounds and showing the behavior she’s learned by being stroked. Harper also has the ability to recognize the direction of voice and turns toward words spoken to her when she hears her name, greetings and praise that she’s learned to recognize through her audio sensor. Harper weighs 6 pounds, about the same as a real baby harp seal.
Carla brought me a meal last week after my surgery and Harper came along for a visit. Randy and I were amazed. Watching Carla and Harper interact was beautiful on its face, but thinking about it through the eyes of a patient was truly special. There’s only one PARO in her hospice program and though there are several trained volunteers, Harper stays at Carla’s house because Carla actively works in more visitation with her than other volunteers do. She told stories of how patients respond to her and Harper….all of them touching and heartwarming.
PARO has proven to be an especially good form of therapy for dementia patients. Just like pet therapy, it’s also been shown to be an effective way to help relieve depression or anxiety, but of course, PARO never needs to be fed, and will never die. Though Carla works with hospice patients, she thought PARO would be an excellent fit for group homes for disabled and mentally handicapped adults, or autists. The interactive nature of PARO, without the drawbacks of real animals mentioned previously, is the key to why she is a good fit in these places. Additionally, many people have allergies or fear when live animals are involved.
With a price tag of $5,000, regardless of the good PARO does, it doesn’t seem feasible to pair one with a patient full time. But in doing some research for this post, I ran across an article that explained how a team of Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) undergrad students, in an Engineering Processes Course, had pitched developing a robotic baby otter, named Ollie, for the same purpose. They claimed, in 2015, that Ollie’s prototype could be made for $500 and volume sales could put Ollie in homes for about $100. There was no update posted to that article, so I don’t know what actually happened to that project. I did find a 2019 article on-line that referred to Ollie the baby otter and its capabilities, but couldn’t confirm that it was ever sold, commercially or otherwise. In the 2019 article, PARO was still the most widely used therapeutic robot.
Technology is amazing. But so are people. And no matter how good PARO is, Harper would be nothing without my friend Carla and others like her. I pray robots never replace people.
P.S. My surgery recovery, physically, is going well but it’s a long road. No swimming or water for another 2 weeks at least and only about 50% of the swelling will be gone in 6 weeks. I’m told not to expect full normal again for 6 months. Ugh. On the other hand, no cancer had spread to the lymph nodes or the other breast so there’s cause for celebration. Thanks for your continued prayers.
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