ABB Robots in Elder Care: Visiting Nurses to Cobots

How elder care went from visiting nurses to PARO and Doova, where ABB GoFa and YuMi cobots could help in care homes, and what home care robots do next.

INDUSTRIAL ROBOTICS

Chat With Robot

9/17/20261 min read

For most of history, an older person who needed help at home got it from family and neighbors. By the early 1900s, cities like Detroit also had visiting nurses who went house to house, changing dressings and helping patients wash and eat.

Group of visiting nurses outside the Visiting Nurses building in Detroit, around 1914
Group of visiting nurses outside the Visiting Nurses building in Detroit, around 1914

Visiting nurses in Detroit, around 1914. Photo: Detroit Publishing Co. / Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Japan is aging faster than any other country and tried robots first. PARO, a furry robotic seal, reached care homes in the early 2000s to calm people with dementia. RIKEN's RIBA and later Robear proved a robot could lift a patient from bed, but both stayed prototypes.

Inventor Takanori Shibata holding the PARO robotic seal
Inventor Takanori Shibata holding the PARO robotic seal

Inventor Takanori Shibata with the PARO therapy robot. Photo: Geraldshields11 / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Home robots for older people are getting closer to real use. At IFA 2026 in Berlin this month, Tuya showed Doova, a wheeled robot that watches for falls, gives medication reminders, and video-calls family if someone stops responding. In San Francisco, Tau Robotics rents out remotely supervised humanoids that clean houses for $30 an hour.

Fraunhofer Care-O-bot service robot reaching for a bottle on a table
Fraunhofer Care-O-bot service robot reaching for a bottle on a table

Fraunhofer's Care-O-bot home assistant robot picking up an object. Photo: Jiuguang Wang / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.0)

ABB doesn't make a home care robot. Its cobots do have the safety design this kind of work would need, though. The GoFa CRB 15000 has torque sensors in all six joints and stops within milliseconds if it bumps into a person. It carries up to 5 kg, reaches 950 mm, and you can teach it by moving the arm by hand.

ABB GoFa CRB 15000 collaborative robot picking up a speaker on a wooden table
ABB GoFa CRB 15000 collaborative robot picking up a speaker on a wooden table

ABB GoFa CRB 15000 cobot at a work table. Photo: ABB

In care homes and pharmacies, a cobot like that could sort medication packs or load meal trays, which gives nurses back time they now spend fetching things. YuMi is better with small, fiddly parts. ABB's Wizard easy programming lets staff build a task by dragging blocks around on a tablet instead of writing code.

ABB YuMi dual-arm collaborative robot
ABB YuMi dual-arm collaborative robot

ABB YuMi collaborative robot. Photo: ABB

The obvious next step is an arm like GoFa on a mobile base that can move around a house and bring someone a glass of water. Safely lifting a person is still unsolved. Until it is, robots will mostly handle the chores around care, and people will still do the caring.

Three ABB GoFa collaborative robot arms of different sizes
Three ABB GoFa collaborative robot arms of different sizes

The ABB GoFa cobot family in three sizes. Photo: ABB

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