It’s not really anyone’s idea of normal care for the elderly, being served by a robot that looks like an anime cartoon gone over the top, but that’s what the Japanese government has come up with for aged care and covering their shortage of nurses.

This is the first “official” application of robot nurses in a care role, however vaguely defined, and it has global ramifications, particularly for the United States, where cost cutting has been a basic business ideology. If they become an accepted health care methodology, robot nurses could be serious trouble for the industry, especially in their present primitive state of development.

The danger is that they seem like a good idea in terms of cost-based care services. This is a different economic approach to nursing, marketed as a money saver, which is capable of directly impacting nursing standards and forms of care.

In terms of providing care, the concept is also bordering on anarchic. Selling points for the robot nurses include the interestingly dangerous theory that robot nurses can “deliver medication” which, as you may have guessed, doesn’t mean “administer.” It means deliver…like a pizza.

Then there’s RIBA, the Robot Nurse Bear, which is designed to act as a patient lifter. This is a concept with some serious practical flaws. RIBA is basically an articulated forklift capable of carrying an adult, but how frail or spinal patients would respond to being carried this way is debatable. RIBA is also trained to navigate in narrow spaces and can lift people on and off toilets. Again there’s some functionality here, but with potentially serious problems attached.

There’s an obvious disconnect between what the robots can do, what needs doing, and what should be left to professionals. The artificial intelligence and software is currently nowhere near good enough to go into service as a credible alternative to a real nurse. The overall impression is that it’s going to take a real nurse or several to describe what actual useful functions a robot can provide, and explain the dangers of leaving people in the care of a machine with the observational powers, empathy and manual dexterity of a toaster.

Issues of reliability and acceptance by hospital staff have risen in the past. The U.S. Department of Defense has approved the nursing equivalent of a MULE, a carrier and support system for military use. The system is basically guided by a nurse, rather than trying to function as a nurse. This seems to be the real capabilities of current robot technology, a very long way away from actual care capacity.

There are real risks to everyone including insurers with this technology, which is heavy on patents and techno-babble and very short on practicality of care. This is unacceptable, as anything that is supposed to handle the care of people needs to be foolproof.