Toyota Motor Corporation (TMC) recently held an event at Mega Web, its vehicle display space and theme park located in Tokyo, Japan, to display four new robots that were developed to provide support in nursing and healthcare.
The robots are a part of the Toyota Partner Robot series that’s being developed to assist humans in their every day activities, including nursing and health care, short-distance personal transport, manufacturing, and domestic duties.
For these particular robots, TMC said it “aims to support independent living for people incapacitated through sickness or injury, while also assisting in their return to health and reducing the physical burden on caregivers.”
Some features of the robots include the Independent Walk Assist, for people whose ability to walk has been impaired by leg paralysis or other causes, and the Walk Training Assist, which implements the Independent Walk Assist’s technology to support return to natural walking, from early training stages, for people with impaired walking.
Additionally, TMC displayed a robot that assists people whose balance has been impaired, as well as a Patient Transfer Assist that reduces the physical burden on caretakers when moving patients.
These nursing and healthcare robots were developed in collaboration with Fujita Health University Hospital in Aichi Prefecture, Japan, which provided TMC feedback on the needs of specialized medical facilities to use in the design of the robots, said the company.
TMC plans to accelerate further development of the robots while keeping medical staffs’ feedback in consideration, and aims for commercialization starting in 2013.
Written by Alyssa Gerace
