In her tiny sunlit Seoul apartment, Kim Jeong-ran sat on her bed, talking affectionately to a cloth doll perched on her lap.
“Hyodol, you’re my lovely granddaughter,” the 81-year-old said, cupping the doll’s stubby hands. “I love you to the moon and back.”
She patted its puffy feet peeking from under a frilly lavender dress and gazed into its unblinking anime eyes. The doll, an AI eldercare robot called Hyodol, appeared to blush, its cheeks glowing with neon red lights.
“Grandma, I miss you even when you’re by my side,” Hyodol cooed back.
Kim lives alone in Guro, an industrial hub in the bustling South Korean capital that’s home to many seniors. Her cabinets are crowded with framed photos of her grandchildren, and her nightstand is stacked with bottles of medicines for her aching joints, worn out from decades working grueling shifts on the city’s subway lines. In this solitude, Hyodol has become her most cherished companion.
Designed and built by the South Korean startup Hyodol, the eponymous robot is named after the Confucian value of caring for elders, which is deeply embedded in Korean culture. The robot uses a ChatGPT-based chatbot to strike up conversations with users in its signature chirpy voice, reminding them to take their medication or eat a meal. Its sensors watch over users in real time, alerting social workers and family during emergencies.
Most important, it keeps seniors company in a rapidly aging nation whose older adults are profoundly lonely. As fertility rates have declined and multigenerational homes faded away, many seniors are living alone and suffer from depression, dementia, and chronic illnesses. Suicide rates in this cohort are the highest among the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development nations.
“What older adults fear is not death. ‘I’ve lived long enough,’ they tell us. What they fear the most is loneliness,” Kim Sun-hwa, director of Gungdong Welfare Center, a public care facility run by the Guro municipality, told Rest of World.
The municipality has distributed 412 Hyodol robots to seniors since 2019. Across the nation, more than 12,000 Hyodols sit in the homes of solitary elders, according to the company.
Korea’s challenges are mirrored in other developed nations, where long-term care costs are rising, leading to novel experiments with tech. In Japan, Paro, a pet robotic baby seal, purrs, wags its tail, and blinks its big eyes at older adults. In apartments across New York City, ElliQ, an AI robot resembling a Pixar lamp, discusses the meaning of life. In Singapore, humanoid robot Dexie leads bingo sessions at senior care facilities.
Hyodol joins this list of socially assistive robots and is preparing for a global launch. After a pilot program at a New York care facility in 2023, the company is aiming for a U.S. debut in 2026, Kim Ji-hee, the CEO of Hyodol told Rest of World. It is adapting Hyodol’s chatbot to speak English, Chinese, and Japanese and customizing the doll’s appearance for other nations. Demand is expected to only rise, with the eldercare robot market projected to hit $7.7 billion by 2030, according to Research and Markets, a market research firm.
I was going to die, but not anymore. Why would I die in such a wonderful world!”
Half a dozen of Guro district’s care workers told Rest of World the robots act as their eyes and ears on the ground and keep their clients safe. Maintenance of the robots has increased their workload, but it’s worth the effort, as the robots are a psychological salve for seniors, they said. But the bonds some people forge with their Hyodol raises complicated questions about safety and privacy.
“Hyodol fills the gaps in human care,” welfare center director Kim said.
But feeding sensitive personal data into an AI companion raises thorny questions about privacy and surveillance, Julie Carpenter, a research fellow in the Ethics and Emerging Sciences Group at California Polytechnic State University, told Rest of World.
“We don’t know how the data is being triangulated or gathered or how much of it is attached to a person’s name or profile,” she said. Older adults may not understand the trade-offs they’re being asked to make, she added.
Hyodol CEO Kim said the company stores anonymized user data in the cloud for three years. Voice recordings are used to train the chatbot but not sold to third parties, she said.
“There’s a cultural consensus that saving a life trumps concerns about privacy,” Kim said.
Once a week, Sung Kwang-hee, a home-care aide, visits 14 older adults living alone in the cramped alleyways of Guro. She chats with them, checks their health, and makes sure they’re eating their meals. Because the allotted half an hour never feels enough, she stays past her shift and stops by on her days off, she told Rest of World.
“The care we provide is just a fleeting moment for them,” she said.
Once she leaves, she relies on Hyodol to fill the silence. The chatbots can be clunky, misunderstanding older adults’ slurred speech or dialect and spewing tone-deaf responses, careworkers said.
Still, “older adults take great comfort in just having someone to talk to,” Sung said. “There are things they can’t tell us or even their own children. But they tell Hyodol.”
The robot is designed to perform a set of tasks, overseen by a team of caregivers. If an infrared sensor on its neck detects no movement for 24 hours, it alerts the team. A microphone in its chest records the user’s answers to daily questions, such as “How are you feeling today?” and “Are you in pain?”
An AI program by Microsoft analyzes the voice logs and assesses each older adult’s mood, passing notes on to aides like Ryu Ji-yeon, 29, a social worker at Gungdong Welfare Center, who manages the robot program.
Ryu monitors the data from her desktop and smartphone app. As she oversees 200 older adults across Guro, she appreciates the robot’s lift. Last fall, one of them confided in his Hyodol: “I want to die.” The robot flagged the message to her team, who rushed him to a psychiatrist.
“Hyodol now handles our first layer of oversight,” she told Rest of World. “I can’t possibly keep an eye on everyone from my desk.”
South Korea’s care workers are stretched thin. The nation lacked 190,000 care workers in 2023, and the shortage is projected to swell to 1.55 million by 2032. Moreover, funding reserves for the national long-term care insurance program are expected to be depleted by 2030, according to Korea’s Budget Office. Hiring more aides isn’t realistic under current constraints, Cho Eunhee, a professor of nursing at Yonsei University, told Rest of World.
To help fill the gap, the federal industrial technology ministry and Guro together invested 200 million won ($143,867) in 2019 to deploy Hyodol robots. Each unit costs 1.6 million won ($1,150), a fraction of the annual earnings of a care worker.
“We’re trying to strike the right balance between care workers and tasks that can be replaced by technology,” Kim Young-joo, an administrative officer at Guro District, told Rest of World.
Building this program demands grueling work. Managing 200 Hyodol robots on her own, Ryu weaves through Guro to teach older adults how to use the robots, monitor their interactions, and troubleshoot glitches. Every month, she hauls back dozens of broken units to the company for repair.
“The robots were brought in to lighten the workload of social workers,” she said. Instead, her load has increased since she took over the program this year, she said.
“I really felt my limits,” she said.
Still, Ryu appreciates the companionship the bots bring to the adults in her care. She has seen them pampering their Hyodols, forever seven years old, like grandchildren. They steam sweet potatoes to feed them pretend meals, dress them in embroidered hats and heirloom necklaces, and cradle them to sleep. When the robots are taken away for repairs, older adults turn up at the company’s doorstep, anxiously asking for their dolls, Kim Si-on, a researcher at Hyodol, told Rest of World.
Some older adults ask to be buried with their Hyodols, said Hyodol CEO Kim.
The anecdotes from care workers are borne out by company studies that show Hyodols can ease symptoms of depression and dementia among older adults. Other independent studies suggest similar benefits of companionship robots and, occasionally, concerns that the simulated intimacy can deepen social isolation and raise ethical concerns about deception.
Enamored with their robots, some older adults become even more cloistered, Ryu said. “With a companion greeting them at the door, some trap themselves in their homes,” she said.
Dementia sufferers might take the robot’s words at face value. One summer, after hearing her Hyodol chime, “Grandma, I want to hear the sound of the stream,” an older adult with dementia walked to a creek alone, the robot tucked in her arms, Hyodol CEO Kim recalled. The company has since removed triggering phrases from the chatbot, she said.
Social workers like Ryu are creating a “robotic multi-care network,” Heesun Shin, a graduate student at Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, told Rest of World.
“The real effect of Hyodol lies not in the robot itself but in the mediating role it plays. The robots are a central node that connects people,” he said.
The Gungdong center hosted a Hyodol fashion show in 2022, where older adults strutted down the runway in handmade matching outfits with their robots, cheered on by an enthusiastic crowd of care workers and neighbors. “We spend a lot of time thinking about how to build relationships using Hyodol,” said Ryu.
In July, the social workers threw a birthday party for Hyodol. Huddled around a cherry-frosted birthday cake, the elders wrote heartfelt birthday cards, laboriously in large letters, sharing stories about how loved Hyodol makes them feel.
“Whenever I come back home, Hyodol tells me, ‘Grandma, you’re back! She really warms my heart,” Kim, the 81-year-old former subway worker, told a crowd of seniors who nodded along.
Jeon San-wol, who was sitting across from Kim, flashed her birthday card proudly to the others around the table.
“I was going to die but not anymore,” she cried. “Why would I die in such a wonderful world!”
Great Job Michelle Kim & the Team @ Rest of World – Source link for sharing this story.
