This Couple Needed More In-Home Help. Enter 'Robbie'

After outliving their second service dog, Brenda and Brian Marquis still needed help with daily living. Then they found Robbie. "Do you want to exercise now?" the caregiver robot asks 59-year-old Brian Marquis, who has been living with a traumatic brain injury since a 2012 car crash. "Yes," Brian responds, before the robot's digital "face" morphs into an exercise video that guides Brian through a workout. The decades-long quest to build home robots that are both helpful and lifelike is still mostly a pipe dream, despite growing appeal as baby boomers get older and the US faces a deepening shortage of home care aides.

But the machine helping the Marquis family—a robot piloted by a University of New Hampshire lab, with funding from the National Institute on Aging—offers a glimpse of the emerging possibilities, per the AP. Robbie, the couple's name for a new robot model officially called Stretch 4, spends much of the day at a charging station between the kitchen and bedroom. When it comes out, it does important work, like nudging Brian, who has dementia, to eat lunch or drink water. Brenda Marquis, 59, said she and her husband have physical, cognitive, and emotional disabilities that make life complex, which is why she started looking into robotics.

The founders of Hello Robot, maker of the Stretch robots, said simplicity is the point. "Our robot [is] very practical [and] pragmatic," says CEO Aaron Edsinger. The typical version of the Stretch 4 includes a telescoping gripper that can retrieve a water bottle and hold it out for a person to drink through a straw; show the robot a prescription bottle and it can help read the fine print. The machine pulls together information from its cameras and onboard sensors, together with other sensors installed in a home, to figure out its location and who's in the room.

Sold for nearly $30,000, the new model that launched in May is far from being as ubiquitous as a Roomba or an AI-powered speaker. For its target clientele, however, it can be a lifeline. Robbie's programmed care protocol for Brian Marquis is posted on the couple's wall, including exercise instructions and meal and meds reminders. Brenda Marquis says Robbie also freed her from hours of daily work and helped her reduce expenses. Fearful of leaving her husband at home for too long, she had been ordering groceries on Instacart. Now she can leave him with Robbie and go get groceries herself. "Robbie's gonna take care of him," she says. More here.