These robots can clean, exercise - and care for you in old age. Would you trust them to?

It sounds like something from a sci-fi film - but some scientists believe this clever new tech could help alleviate strains on the UK care system

These robots can clean, exercise - and care for you in old age. Would you trust them to?

28 October 2025

[Pallab Ghosh profile image]

Pallab GhoshScience Correspondent

[BBC A sketch of a robot with their arm around a person]
BBC

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"We're not trying to build Terminator," jokes Rich Walker, director of Shadow Robot, the firm that made them.

Bespectacled, with long hair and a beard and moustache, he seems more like a latter-day hippy than a tech whizz, and he is clearly proud as he shows me around his firm.

"We set out to build the robot that helps you, that makes your life better, your general-purpose servant that can do anything around the home, do all the housework..."

But there's a deeper ambition: to address one of the UK's most pressing challenges - the escalating crisis in social care.

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There were 131,000 vacancies for adult care workers in England, a report by charity, Skills for Care, found last year. And in all, around two million people aged 65 and over in England are living with unmet care needs, according to Age UK.

By 2050, one in four people in the UK is expected to be aged 65 or over, potentially putting more strain still on the care system.

Which is where robots come in.

The previous government announced a £34m investment in developing robots that could potentially be used to give care. It went as far as saying, in 2019, that "within the next 20 years, autonomous systems like… robots will become a normal part of our lives, transforming the way we live, work and travel."

Could this "techno-solutionism" - which sounds more like something out of a sci-fi film - really be the solution? And would you really trust your elderly relatives, or yourself when you're at your most vulnerable with what is essentially a very strong machine?

Workouts with Pepper the robot

Japan offers a peek into a future with robots living among us.

Ten years ago, its government began offering subsidies to robot manufacturers to develop and popularise the use of robots in care homes - fuelled in part by an ageing population and relative lack of care home staff.

Dr James Wright, an AI specialist and visiting professor at Queen Mary University of London, spent seven months observing them. And specifically, looking at how well they worked in a Japanese care home.

In all, three types of robots were studied: the first, called HUG, was designed by Fuji Corporation in Japan and looked like a highly sophisticated walking frame. It had support pads that people could lean right into, and it helped carers lift people from bed to, say, a wheelchair or the toilet.

[NurPhoto via Getty Images Demonstration of the HUG robot (mobility support)]
NurPhoto via Getty Images

Nursing-care robot HUG, by Fuji Corporation in Japan, was designed to help carers lift people

The second, meanwhile, looked a bit like a baby seal and was called Paro. This robot, intended to stimulate dementia patients, was trained to respond to being stroked through movements and sounds.

The third was a small friendly-looking humanoid robot called Pepper. It could give instructions and also demonstrate exercises by moving its arms - and was used to lead exercise classes in the care home.

Even before he started observing them, Dr Wright had bought into the hype a little.

"I was expecting that the robots would be easily adopted by care workers who were massively overstretched and extremely busy in their work.

"What I found was, almost the opposite."

[Getty Images An elderly woman looks to a robot and touches the screen on its front]
Getty Images

Pepper could give instructions and demonstrate exercises by moving its arms - but some people who tried it out found its voice too high pitched

He discovered that, in fact, the biggest drain on the time of care home staff was cleaning and recharging the robots - and above all troubleshooting when they went wrong.

"After several weeks the care workers decided the robots were more trouble than they were worth and used them less and less, because they were too busy to use them," he tells me.

"HUG had to be moved around all the time to get [it] out of the residents' way. Paro caused distress to one of the residents who had become overly attached to it. And they couldn't follow Pepper's exercise routines because it was too short for people to see - and they couldn't hear it properly because its voice was too high-pitched."

[The The Washington Post via Getty Images A person speaks with "Paro" the robot baby harp seal]
The The Washington Post via Getty Images

Paro looks like a baby seal and is intended to respond through movements and sounds to being stroked

The teams behind the robots had their own responses to Dr Wright's research.

The developers behind HUG says that since then they've refined the design to make it more compact and user-friendly. Paro's creator Takanori Shibata said that Paro has been used for 20 years and pointed to trials that demonstrated "clinical evidence of [the] therapeutic effects". Pepper is now owned by a different company and its software has been substantially updated.

And yet the study was not without merit.

Mr Walker of Shadow Robot is adamant that the use of robots in care should not be dismissed. For one thing, he argues, the next generation of them will be much more capable.

From labs to the real world

Praminda Caleb-Solly, a professor at the University of Nottingham is determined to make these robots work well in practice. "We are trying to get these robots out of the labs into the real world," she says.

To do this she has set up a network, Emergence, to help connect robot makers with businesses and individuals who will use them - and to find out from elderly people themselves what they'd want from robots.

The answers vary.

Some people have said they want robots with voice interaction and, understandably, a non-threatening appearance. Others want a "cute design". But many requests come down to the practical way they'd like the robot to adapt to their changing needs - and for the robot to charge and clean itself.

"We don't want to look after the robot – we want the robot to look after us," said one person who was asked the question.

[Caremark Genie's: small robots with an oval screen at the top]
Caremark

Caremark has been trialling Genie - a small voice-activated robot

Some businesses in the UK are testing out robots too.

Home care provider, Caremark has been trialling Genie, a small voice-activated robot, with some people who use their services in Cheltenham.

One man who has early-onset dementia explained he enjoyed asking Genie to play Glenn Miller songs.

Overall, however, reactions have been "like Marmite," according to director Michael Folkes – with some people loving Genie, and others less complimentary.

But Mr Folkes also stresses these devices aren't about replacing people. "We're trying to build a future where carers have more time to care."

Robot hands: learning from evolution

Back in the laboratory of the Shadow Robot Company in London, Rich Walker points out another big challenge: mastering the perfect robotic hand.

"For the robot to be useful, it needs to have the same ability to interact with the world as [a] human does," he explains. "And for that it needs human-like dexterity."

[Getty Images A dextrous hand robot putting a sugar cube into a mug]
Getty Images

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