John Pavlus on March 3, 2008 10:28 AM
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From the Inadvertent Findings Dept.:
Sony's robo-dog AIBO is just as good as a real dog at assuaging loneliness in nursing home residents. Could bona-fide robot caregivers be far off?
Here's my question: did the investigators control for the fact that most nursing homes are such soul-destroying places that residents could probably be "cheered up" by a #&*%ing pet rock, much less some cheesy plastic dog-droid?
Yes, let's find that sweet spot: the minimum possible threshold for maintaining our elderly folks' mental health combined with the mimimum number of biological beings involved. Hell, why not just swap out AIBOs for Roombas? Granny gets "quality time" AND the floor gets cleaned! She'll never know the difference!
Time to cue up The Who on my iPod.
Jeremy Brown on January 16, 2008 2:30 PM
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When I was growing up, there was one big, mean monster of a dog always on the loose in my neighborhood that bit every kid at least once (it belonged, I think, to the house with the perpetually open front door and Busch can front-lawn decorations). When it was my turn I didn’t need to be the Dog Whisperer to know what was about to happen; the bone-rattling, guttural growls were indicator a-plenty.
In my unfortunate case, boy and dog understood each other perfectly, though certainly not all canine noises are so obvious. Scientists at Budapest’s ELTE University are now developing computer software that may one day allow people to identify the emotional undercurrents of various barks, woofs and grrrs (if I could’ve spoken with the dog that bit me, he might’ve intimated something similar to Wolf here).
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