When this morning is typical of her life, Barbara Löser cannot complain about loneliness in old age. Today her apartment is a hair salon, a neighborhood café and a test track for a care robot. It’s ten in the morning when two computer scientists ring the doorbell of their AWO apartment to subject the little assistant on wheels to a stress test. In the next four weeks he will be used by six other seniors. And Löser, called Bärbel by her friends, spent two weeks with him in the summer, so she is suitable for the pre-test.
“I’m not a computer person, but I got on well with the guy,” says the seventy-nine-year-old widow. She met her second husband while working in the nearby porcelain factory in the town on the edge of the Thuringian Forest. They lived together in the apartment in the basement for another four years, and ten years have passed since his death. Löser is energetic, the robot fits into her everyday life. “He already got a name from me: Robbi,” she says, laughing.
Barbara Löser (left) lets a blind friend touch her robot.
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Image: Jens Gyarmaty
In nursing, robots could perhaps one day widen bottlenecks, labor is scarce here, machines can possibly do repetitive and strenuous work better than nursing staff, who are abused and poorly paid in many respects. But the acceptance is manageable.
In Barbara Löser’s apartment (left), Professor Horst-Michael Groß checks a nursing robot.
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Image: Jens Gyarmaty
“Robotics has developed in the wrong direction through science fiction: too aggressive and combative, too autonomous,” says Horst-Michael Groß, computer science professor at the Technical University of Ilmenau, one of three scientists who solves this morning in their apartment visit. “You have to get that out of your head. Robots should be understood as helpers.”
Robbi has to be able to do a lot: move independently and safely to previously defined points in the apartment, even over the edges of the red carpet, charge himself, give gymnastics instructions, accept a video call from Löser’s three children from his first marriage and take the elderly woman into the picture and now and then recite half-serious, half-silly statements that the Ilmenau University of Technology team programmed.
A research assistant shows Professor Horst-Michael Groß how a robot grabs a plastic bottle.
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Image: Jens Gyarmaty
“I’m bored,” he already said when Professor Groß hurried off to his lecture after a while. “In the meantime I’ll load up on something,” he says after Barbara Löser’s friendly words. At the charging station, to which he docks himself, he adds that a little electricity is good. From time to time he reminds the pensioner that she should have a drink too.
Barbara Löser fits the profile defined by the researchers perfectly: old enough to think about helping around the house, yet fit enough not to be dependent on it. Together with nursing scientists from Osnabrück and social scientists from Berlin, they want to find out in the project, which is financed by the federal government, whether communication between seniors and relatives or nursing services can be simplified with a mobile video phone and thus, for example, fewer trips to the seniors are possible.
