Humanoid robots for elder care: what 50 geriatric care professionals think

Humanoid robots for elder care

Eighty-nine percent of healthcare professionals in France say they support integrating socially assistive robots into clinical settings. That number is higher than most people in the humanoid robot industry might guess, and it comes from a survey of 148 actual healthcare workers, not industry boosters.

The numbers come from a new study published in BMC Geriatrics on November 5, 2026 by Laure Blavette and colleagues at Hôpital Broca in Paris.

The team conducted semi-structured interviews with 50 healthcare professionals across 3 French geriatric hospitals after they had worked with a socially assistive robot performing welcoming, wayfinding, and information tasks for patients.

The conclusion is not "robots are welcome in hospitals." It is "robots are welcome in hospitals under conditions the industry has not yet fully delivered."

What the robots were doing

The robot studied at Broca Hospital is part of the EU-funded SPRING project, which deployed PAL Robotics' ARI system in a geriatric day care unit.

ARI is a 1.65-meter wheeled robot designed for social interaction, not physical manipulation. Its hospital role covered welcoming patients at the entrance, guiding them to the right ward, providing information about consultation procedures, reminding patients about hygiene protocols, and offering recreational interaction when staff were occupied elsewhere.

These are genuinely valuable tasks in a geriatric hospital.

Healthcare staff in France, as in most of Europe -- and probably the world -- are under severe pressure: not enough nurses, not enough time, too many patients with complex needs. The robot wasn't trying to replace a physician or a nurse ... it was simply handling the repetitive logistical work that consumes nursing attention without requiring clinical judgment.

What healthcare workers said

The staff findings from the BMC study are worth quoting in detail. Workers saw the robot as a potential "institutional modernization" signal and a tool for relieving them of repetitive tasks. That is the support part.

The conditions they named as necessary were specific:

• thorough workflow redesign before any deployment
• clear demarcation of which tasks belong to the robot and which to humans
• direct physical and technical adaptations to the care environment
• continuous human supervision whenever the robot interacts with patients who have cognitive disorders
  

The concerns were pretty specific too.

Healthcare workers asked why budgets were going to robots when hospitals lack nurses and basic equipment. They raised unresolved questions about data usage, patient consent, privacy protections, and legal liability when something goes wrong in a care interaction. They said that patients with dementia or other neurocognitive conditions cannot safely interact with a robot without someone present to supervise, and that informed consent from this population is ethically complex territory.

A parallel Digital Health survey of 148 French healthcare professionals found 82% would personally use a robot in their own practice.

The highest-rated application: help with physical tasks, which the PAL Robotics' ARI system is not yet designed to do. Ratings for various tasks included:

• 7.89 out of 10: assisting physical tasks
• 5.86 out of 10: therapeutic support
• 5.80 out of 10: feeding assistance
  

The highest-rated task makes a ton of sense. I've seen it personally with my mother, who is 91 and was recently hospitalized: being able to move patients, care for them, help them in the toilet, and bathe them is extremely challenging for almost any nurse.

Many of those tasks are also very sensitive personal tasks that a high-quality, strong but gentle, and very capable robot could potentially handle much better, with less embarrassment, than a human assistant.

The elder care opportunity is enormous

The demographics driving this research are hard to overstate.

Europe's population is aging faster than its healthcare workforce can grow. France, Germany, Japan, South Korea, Italy: every major economy outside sub-Saharan Africa faces the same arithmetic: more elderly patients, fewer working-age people to care for them, and greater complexity per patient as comorbidities accumulate.

The eldercare robot market was valued at $3.14 billion in 2025. Healthcare robotics overall is projected to exceed $44 billion by 2028. Those numbers are not being driven by surgical robots alone. They reflect a broad recognition that the system cannot staff its way out of this demographic shift.

Yet the hospital deployment record for social robots remains thin.

NAO and Pepper, the two most-studied platforms in the academic literature, are facing commercial uncertainty: Aldebaran filed for bankruptcy in February 2025 and entered receivership in June. PARO, the therapeutic seal robot, has the strongest clinical evidence base in dementia care but limited scalability.

PAL Robotics' ARI has been the most systematically deployed in real hospital environments in Europe, specifically through the SPRING project.

What the gap actually is

The Blavette team's conclusion is precise: implementing socially assistive robotics is "an organizational transformation demanding ethical safeguards, contextual adaptation, robust governance, and sustained professional engagement."

That is essentially a requirements document.

The implication for the broader humanoid robot industry is straightforward. The healthcare market is large, motivated, and more open to robot integration than outsiders assume. But healthcare is also the domain where the cost of a robot malfunction is measured in patient harm rather than a delayed shipment. The workflow redesign, the ethical frameworks, the consent protocols highlight what adoption actually looks like in a regulated clinical environment.

Now it's up to the robotics ecosystem to deliver on what health care systems need.

Sources

• Bioengineer.org — Healthcare professionals evaluate socially assistive robots
• BMC Geriatrics — Blavette et al. 2026 study
• Frontiers in Digital Health — French HCP survey 2026
• JMIR Human Factors — ARI with LLM at Broca Hospital
• PAL Robotics — SPRING project blog
• PMC — HCP perspectives on SARs systematic review 2026
• JMIR Research Protocols — HOSPER study at Italian geriatric hospital