Not every family is in the financial or physical situation to be able to provide the care that an elderly relative can often come to need. Ideally of course, you would take care of your family yourself, live in close proximity, or as health deteriorates, have a parent or grandparent move in. Still, I recognize, have seen in my own family, that sometimes the assistance of assisted living or a nursing facility becomes necessary. If you are not able to lift them for example…. Still, the nursing home is in and of itself less than ideal. Further, it is not used as a last resort by far too big a percentage of the family. Even worse, many elderly people are more or less abandoned in such facilities, visited rarely if at all, nearly forgotten except the occasional phone call, sometimes even living far from any family. To make matters worse, Toyota seems to think it would be a good idea to delegate the care of these people to a robotic staff.[1] Now they are to be denied even the minimal comfort of contact with unknown, harried, and busy staff. Perhaps worse, they want to delegate the raising of children to robots, when intuition, common sense, instinct, and research all highlight the absolute critical nature of human interaction in a child's development. This is a tragic development.
[1] http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?type=technologyNews&storyID=8644628