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I worked at a small robotics company in the Netherlands, technical university spinoff. We did tests in care homes for elderly and disabled people and we actuall

I worked at a small robotics company in the Netherlands, technical university spinoff. We did tests in care homes for elderly and disabled people and we actually had clients that wanted to use our robots and were very positive about them. But we were just too early. The robot didn't even need to be very autonomous, shared autonomy was part of the plan (fake it till you make it and honest about it :-) ). I controlled the robot from the other side of the (small) country to give people their teddy bears and TV remotes etc. Problem was that we tried to do our hardware completely by ourselves, whereas nowadays there are several options for mobile manipulator robots that look good enough to put in a home. We spent more time getting the robot to work than on useful applications (we had dozens of activities of daily live a robot could support). And even the getting our robot to work could be done more efficiency (in hindsight). We should have used e.g. an EtherCAT motor controller instead of writing of doing it all ourselves on a micro-controller. We didn't progress enough quickly enough for our investors and subsidizers and ran out of money. A another great lesson was this though: when you hear talk about robots in care, the complaint I get a lot is that that is sad for the clients, because they don't get someone to talk to (but a robot) and they will get lonely. That turns out not entirely the case. A lot of disabled clients told me they don't want to talk to the care-givers all that much, they just want their drink/toilet break/pen they dropped etc. They have friends and family and don't feel lonely. The complaint about loneliness is coming from the care-givers. For elderly people, it may be different though, but I found that very interesting.

oceanman888 8y ago
A lot hardware startup that started from zero made a first product that can barely called a MVP (Gopro first product was a camera shell, DJI first product was flight controller) do you think such ultra minimalist product(yet very meaningful to understand customer) could have been done looking back now?
- ragebol 8y ago
  The problem with a lot of robots in care is that if you pick 1 task, the MVP to solve that problem doesn't even have to be a robot. To automate 2 tasks, you will need 2 MVPs and this doesn't really scale. A single robot can do a lot of different things, all with the same hardware that gets used a lot, where as 1-funtion MVPs only get very infrequent use. But it does require to build a robot that can do a lot of things, which is not a minimal thing to do. Things get expensive and complex when robot arms get involved, which do give you lots of capabilities in return. Arms and mobility make the difference between a smart speaker like Alexa and a robot.
tixocloud 8y ago
Reading your story from an outsiders’ perspective, did you guys have a commercial person figure who was going to pay for the robots? From my experience, healthcare usually comes down to figuring out who is willing to pay for it (insurer, user, govt, etc.) and less so about the tech. You are right that the tech doesn’t need to be fancy but funding model is usually the bit needed to be fixed. A buddy of mine is successfully taking took a smart baby mat to market (so far anyway)
- ragebol 8y ago
  We did have a business case worked out, even had a Dutch care insurance company as investor. Those insurers would pay for the largest bit.
boxspam 8y ago
Robovalley right? Is there still animo for this? I would love to invest in elderly care technology, especially AI for Alzheimers. Would this still be possible, or is it a big company (Philips?) thing now?
- ragebol 8y ago
  We were a spinoff of TU Eindhoven. Robovalley went up into Holland Robotics recently, AFAIK, but Netherlands is small of course. Our company just stopped. I actually interviewed at https://www.robotcaresystems.com/ https://www.robotcaresystems.com/ that now have an autonomous rollator on the market and I recently found out about https://mojin-robotics.de/ https://mojin-robotics.de/ which seems to continue where we left off. So, yes, there is still animo for robotics in care. I don't know any companies that focus on Alzheimers, but there is a bunch of medical robot tech companies around here, eg. http://microsure.nl/ http://microsure.nl/ that do micro-surgery and http://www.preceyes.nl/ http://www.preceyes.nl/ that make eye-surgery robots. A There's Health Valley (https://www.healthvalley.nl/welcome-to-health-valley https://www.healthvalley.nl/welcome-to-health-valley), that may know some companies that do focus on Alzheimers more.

oceanman888 8y ago

A lot hardware startup that started from zero made a first product that can barely called a MVP (Gopro first product was a camera shell, DJI first product was flight controller) do you think such ultra minimalist product(yet very meaningful to understand customer) could have been done looking back now?

ragebol 8y ago
The problem with a lot of robots in care is that if you pick 1 task, the MVP to solve that problem doesn't even have to be a robot. To automate 2 tasks, you will need 2 MVPs and this doesn't really scale. A single robot can do a lot of different things, all with the same hardware that gets used a lot, where as 1-funtion MVPs only get very infrequent use. But it does require to build a robot that can do a lot of things, which is not a minimal thing to do. Things get expensive and complex when robot arms get involved, which do give you lots of capabilities in return. Arms and mobility make the difference between a smart speaker like Alexa and a robot.

tixocloud 8y ago

Reading your story from an outsiders’ perspective, did you guys have a commercial person figure who was going to pay for the robots? From my experience, healthcare usually comes down to figuring out who is willing to pay for it (insurer, user, govt, etc.) and less so about the tech. You are right that the tech doesn’t need to be fancy but funding model is usually the bit needed to be fixed. A buddy of mine is successfully taking took a smart baby mat to market (so far anyway)

ragebol 8y ago
We did have a business case worked out, even had a Dutch care insurance company as investor. Those insurers would pay for the largest bit.

boxspam 8y ago

Robovalley right? Is there still animo for this? I would love to invest in elderly care technology, especially AI for Alzheimers. Would this still be possible, or is it a big company (Philips?) thing now?

ragebol 8y ago
We were a spinoff of TU Eindhoven. Robovalley went up into Holland Robotics recently, AFAIK, but Netherlands is small of course. Our company just stopped. I actually interviewed at https://www.robotcaresystems.com/ https://www.robotcaresystems.com/ that now have an autonomous rollator on the market and I recently found out about https://mojin-robotics.de/ https://mojin-robotics.de/ which seems to continue where we left off. So, yes, there is still animo for robotics in care. I don't know any companies that focus on Alzheimers, but there is a bunch of medical robot tech companies around here, eg. http://microsure.nl/ http://microsure.nl/ that do micro-surgery and http://www.preceyes.nl/ http://www.preceyes.nl/ that make eye-surgery robots. A There's Health Valley (https://www.healthvalley.nl/welcome-to-health-valley https://www.healthvalley.nl/welcome-to-health-valley), that may know some companies that do focus on Alzheimers more.