2nd cycle – INNOVCARE Webinar n°4
Wednesday 8 February 2023, 9 am to 11 am (France) / 5 pm to 7 pm (Japan) – Online
- Martin Chevalier, EHESS – Care robots, care recipients and human-robot interaction « third parties » : a socio-historical perspective
- Tomohiro Shibata, Kyushu Institute of Technology – Innovating Care with Technology in Japan
Care robots, care recipients and human-robot interaction « third parties » : a socio-historical perspective – Martin Chevalier (EHESS)
‘Adoptions’ of care robots, conceived as the beginning of an answer or a ‘magic bullet’ to ease the loads of relatives and care staff in aging societies such as France and Japan, remain limited so far, despite a plethora of short-term, lab-based experiments or ‘tests’ with physically or cognitively impaired users, and ambitious political plans and programs to foster their development and a large-scale diffusion. Part of the answer, I suggest, relates to the contrast between promises of robots’ autonomy and adaptiveness, and what it takes to make them socially engaging and operational in practice, especially when their users are care recipients suffering from various kinds and levels of physical and/or cognitive impairment. Drawing on a genealogy of the personal support function assigned to robots by academic and corporate researchers, thus tracing back a long history of prototypes designed to assist “vulnerable” people in their daily life (disabled people, older adults and other people “with special needs” such as autistic children), I will highlight the constant, crucial, and yet overlooked role of human ‘third-parties’, in particular front-line caregivers, in supervising, co-constructing or even making human-robot interactions possible in both realistic but simulated environments (homelike test beds) and “real” ones (rehabilitation facilities and nursing care homes).
Innovating Care with Technology in Japan – Tomohiro Shibata (Kyushu Institute of Technology)
Abstract upcoming
