Aging at home
FUJI released a new model, Hug T1-02, which won an award from Japan's health and welfare ministry.
A dated step forward on the record · Company-reported
What the source says
“The new model Hug T1-02 released in Oct. 2019 received Japan's Health, Labor and Welfare Ministry Award”
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.
- 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.
- RIKEN and Sumitomo Riko showed ROBEAR, a lighter experimental lifting robot (140 kg, against 230 kg for the earlier RIBA-II). RIKEN later noted the project had ended.