Setback
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.
A delay, pause or setback
What the source says
“Staff stopped using Hug after only a few days, saying it was cumbersome and time consuming to wheel from room to room”
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. A setback stays on the record next to the milestones; the stage moves down only when the rules say so.
Human help: Our sources report it working without human help.
More on Patient transfer robots
- 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.
- 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.