By Chen Ziqi
In a care facility in eastern China’s Jiangsu province, a waist-high white robot glides quietly between rooms. Its digital face lights up in a cheerful greeting as it makes its rounds. It reminds caregivers to reposition bedridden residents, prompts medication schedules, and tracks basic vital indicators, notifying medical staff if it detects unusual changes in heart rate or breathing.
It may look futuristic, but the problem it addresses is deeply human, and increasingly urgent.
From Asia to Europe and North America, aging societies are confronting the same reality: as demand for elder care grows and caregiver shortages intensify, governments and health systems are exploring ways to ensure older adults receive adequate care.
In China, the scale of the challenge is as well striking. According to the National Bureau of Statistics, the population aged 60 and older reached 320 million by the end of last year, roughly a quarter of the people in this age group. And the number of older adults with severe physical disabilities continues to rise.
Yet the number of professional caregivers is not keeping pace. Currently, China faces a shortage of more than 5.5 million professional caregivers, according to Guangming Daily. With about 90% of older adults preferring to age at home, families often shoulder major responsibility.
It is against this backdrop that the fast developing service robots are gaining attention, attracting both public interest and growing industry investment.
Fully autonomous humanoid robots capable of cooking, cleaning, and providing comprehensive elder care are still a long way off. But in more targeted ways, technology is already making a measurable difference.
Wu Liying, a woman in her 70s from Hangzhou used one in a rehabilitation session recently. With its assistance, she was able to walk from the first to the third floor without resting. “I felt the equipment lifted my legs and made walking much easier,” she said.
Other innovations focus on relieving caregivers from physically demanding tasks. Cleaning bedridden older adults after a bowel movement is a time-consuming and exhausting daily task.
Now, nursing robots are stepping in to help. Each features an attachment that both looks and works like a traditional dipper. Connected to a main cleaning unit on the floor, it uses built-in sensors to detect waste, clean the area, and air-dry the body automatically.
A caregiver at a care facility in northwest China’s Shaanxi Province said, “Before, I spent more than half a day cleaning up waste and changing bedding. Now, with the help of nursing robots, I have more time to talk with my older residents.”
That shift, from physical strain to human interaction, is precisely where many experts see the real value.
Despite the promise, widespread use of service robots in private homes remains limited. Real-world conditions pose practical challenges: small apartments, high costs, and ease of operation.
These hurdles, experts say, will take time to overcome. Wang Sumei, an associate researcher at the Chinese Academy of Sciences specializing in technological innovation, noted that the priority is improving technical expertise to enhance the practicality of care robots in real home settings. Collecting data is crucial for breakthroughs, but it is costly, and real-home experiments remain limited.
Building on this, reducing costs will be essential to expand wider adoption. For example, exoskeleton robots used for rehabilitation can cost around $22,000, beyond the reach of most households.
Looking further ahead, social questions also emerge. How might emotional attachment to machines affect older adults? Could heavy reliance on robotics alter long-standing family caregiving traditions? These ethical considerations will require careful thought as the technology advances.
Industry experts emphasize that care robots are not intended to replace people. Instead, they aim to handle repetitive and heavy tasks: lifting, cleaning, monitoring, so caregivers and adult children can have more time and energy to focus on personalized care, like rehabilitative treatments and meaningful conversation.
Beyond technology, broader policy support remains essential. Expanding community-based rehabilitation services, increasing public health insurance coverage, ensuring equitable access to elder care, particularly in underserved regions, are all critical to social stability in aging societies.
In this larger ecosystem, service robots may play a bigger and more important role, complementing human care while addressing demographic challenges faced by aging societies globally.
2026 marks the opening of China’s 15th Five-Year Plan period, a new policy cycle in which elderly care remain a central priority. As demographic pressures intensify, technologies that support older adults are expected to receive stronger institutional backing, from research funding to pilot programs and public service integration. Under China’s long-standing human-centered development approach, innovation is not viewed as an end in itself, but as a means to enhance well-being. In that context, caring robots are less about futuristic display, and more about building a society that adapts thoughtfully to the realities of aging.
About the author: Chen Ziqi is a reporter from CGTN Radio, China
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I think Rossleigh will enjoy writing about this article. The endless possibilities for mischief and everything else …..
Well Scummo gave use Robodebt where computers were responsible for the suicide deaths of about 2,200+ innocent Australian taxpayers accused of rorting their social security payments. Now I am not in favour of such actions although I know from too hard experience that is is too frequently necessary to make ends meet, even on the dole.
But what I find galling is the fact that politicians paid $200,000+ per year get caught knowingly making ”incorrect”/”fraudulent” expenses claims and just might get a slap on the wrist with a wet tram ticket and repay ”the error”.
I mean, if I can ”survive” and balance my expenditure on the princely Job Keeper Payment of $793.60 per fortnight for a single person then surely managing $7,692.30 per fortnight should be easy, before I add in the other expense ”bonuses” from the system. Who said, ”Life was not meant to be easy”??
The in-bed cleaning unit sounds a bit like an abattoir chain hosing down a carcass before it is butchered, so I might just pass that opportunity.
Then ”service robots in private homes” will likely become the new status symbol for MAGA followers, eliminating the need for cheap cash labour to complete all the manual & unpleasant tasks of house cleaning that the burgeoning waist-line of the American property owner discourages bending down.
This will reduce the American ”Land of Opportunity” status for Central & South American persons escaping the economic and social destruction from both the US government foreign policies and US multinational corporations in their home countries. So over time, the TACO Trumpery Great Southern Wall will be redundant because nobody will want to come.
Certainly the introduction of personal care robots into aged care facilities will be useful when families often abandon their previous generation to the mushie food menu and annual birthday visits. Having someone/something to talk to does reduce the never ending boredom of watching paint dry and in many cases the robot conversations are likely to be intelligent. Indeed, facility management may even replace human car givers with such robots on a ”financial needs” basis because the robots can be worked 24/7/365 without overtime or all those other financial impediments to profit making for the bosses.
But whatever happened to ”talking to the neighbours”?? You know, that old lady who always seemed to be at her gate when we passed en route to the world?? Oh, of course ….. she is now re-located into a sterile single room aged care facility where she can lose her independence to the usually understaffed human ”care givers” ….. and robots.
But there is one robotic ”social service” that I hesitate to mention, but must for completeness. Remember Arnold Schwarzenegger as ”The Terminator”, a enhanced robotic human mutant must more powerful than a robotic exo-skeleton and programmed with evil intent. If such a eventuality occurred would a conviction of the alleged robot assailant at the following legal trial simply result in switching off the power cord, or removing the battery or smashing with a very heavy wrecking ball?
omigawd! I wish I had time to explore the meaning of this. The energy – electricity requirements meaning, then – the attempt to remove one of the last truly valuable occupations from the workforce. (Oh I forgot – it’s only women, second class citizens, who do this truly important work, at fairly low pay, so it doesn’t matter) Explore the needs of human beings – yes old human beings still need empathy, and that kindly physical touch on the shoulder, – spare them the indignity of robot care!