Aging at home
FUJI said it had sold 1,300 Hug units in total, through care-product dealers across Japan.
A dated step forward on the record · Company-reported · Sets Patient transfer robots's stage
What the source says
“At present, FUJI has set up distributors, including retailers of nursing care products, across Japan and cumulative sales have reached 1,300 units.”
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. This event is one of the milestones that placed it there. 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 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.
- 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.