Aging at home
Japan's RIKEN research institute and Tokai Rubber Industries showed RIBA, a robot that could lift a patient of up to 61 kg from a bed to a wheelchair and back.
A dated step forward on the record · Company-reported
What the source says
“capable of safely lifting and moving a human patient of up to 61 kg from a bed to a wheelchair and back.”
What it means
Patient transfer robots, from FUJI (Hug), RIKEN with Sumitomo Riko (RIBA, ROBEAR research), is at stage 4 of 5 on our ladder: paying customers. Its stage is set by other milestones on its record; this one adds to the history. This line rests on the company's own announcement; no regulator, customer or independent report confirms it in our sources yet.
Human help: Our sources report it working without human help.
More on Patient transfer robots
- A researcher who studied a Japanese care home reported that staff stopped using Hug after a few days, finding it bulky and slow to move between rooms.
- MIT Technology Review noted that the widely pictured ROBEAR was only ever an experiment and was never used in a real care home.
- FUJI said it had sold 1,300 Hug units in total, through care-product dealers across Japan.
- FUJI released a new model, Hug T1-02, which won an award from Japan's health and welfare ministry.
- A national survey of more than 9,000 elder-care homes in Japan found only about 1 in 10 had brought in any care robot.
- Japanese machine maker FUJI started selling a transfer support robot, Hug.