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Programmed loyalty
(by Tim Woodcock - March 03, 2008)
A dog that doesn’t need walking and never poops on the floor? It may sound too good to be true. Well, you haven’t met Aibo, a robotic dog from Japan.
Better still, Aibo has the same tail-wagging enthusiasm as a regular flesh-and-blood dog and can make just as good a companion, says Dr. William Banks, a professor of geriatric medicine at St. Louis University and a Central West End resident.
In a recent academic study, Banks divided 38 nursing-home residents into three groups. One group had a weekly 30-minute visit from Aibo; another group had 30-minute visits from Sparky, Banks’ own dog; and a third group, the control group, went without visits. After seven weeks, each subject was asked to rate his or her level of loneliness during the experiment. There was no statistical difference between those who had been interacting with the real dog and these who had gotten to know the artificial dog. However, both groups who had regular contact with a dog fared better than the group that had no contact.
While Banks designed and wrote the study, it was his wife Marian who took the dogs into the nursing homes. Aibo is a highly sophisticated robot manufactured by Sony as a substitute pet for the Japanese market.
Many of Aibo’s characteristics are the same as a living dog’s, Banks says. He has “the schematic features of a dog” and looks something like a beagle, but he has a hard plastic body, Banks says. The difference is sufficient that, “I will never forget that Aibo is not a dog,” he says.
The robot has an endearing way of flashing his eyes and squeaking, and perhaps most importantly in terms of cultivating a relationship, he responds to the way that a human responds to him, Banks says.
When Banks started recruiting people for the project, he discovered people had strong feelings about the difference between live dogs and robotic ones — but surprisingly as many of the prejudices were for Aibo as for Sparky, Banks says. Nonetheless, Aibo has a way of “converting” people, and no one resisted him on the grounds that he is merely a mechanical creation.
Sparky, by comparison, is not so carefully engineered, although he is trained as a therapy dog. He is a 9-year-old “full-blood mutt,” who contains “every dog gene known to man,” Banks says.
Banks’ research is published in the latest issue of the Journal of American Medical Directors Association.
In terms of practical applications, Banks sees potential in the area of assisted living for seniors. “This health companion could follow a person in his home, giving reminders on when to take medication or sending out an alert when a person has suddenly gone from a vertical position to a horizontal one,” he says. The constant presence of a robot dog could become tiresome, Banks concedes, but if he is viewed as a companion, that wouldn’t necessarily be the case.
Many people like dogs but for many reasons — time commitment, allergies, dogs’ boisterousness — cannot have them as pets and this could be a solution.
There is no next step planned for the study, but Banks says he would like to explore in greater detail the way that interactions with dogs — both real and mechanical — can reduce human loneliness.
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