Ubixian aims to bring more robots into the elderly and education scene by targeting "one elderly and one young"

In early October, the humanoid robot "Optimus Prime" displayed by Tesla became the top news in the technology industry. This robot weighing 73 kilograms, priced at no more than $20,000, and aimed at individual consumers, claims to revolutionize the interactive experience between people and robots.

Humanoid robots are not a new species, but they have not been popularized on the consumer side. The problems they face are very realistic - difficult to mass produce, high cost, and still far from the level of interaction people expect. However, in some specific industries, products implanted with the core technology of humanoid robots have been put into use.

UBTECH Robotics (hereinafter referred to as "UBTECH") is a leading company in the field of artificial intelligence and humanoid robots in China. In order to cope with the mass production and commercialization difficulties faced by the humanoid robot industry, the company chose to apply the core technology of humanoid robots to multiple fields such as education, logistics and epidemic prevention. Today, it has once again entered a new industry: smart health care.

Zhang Chengkun, senior technical director of UBTECH's health division, said in an exclusive interview with Jiemian News that the company's current two major business segments are "one old and one young". "One old" refers to the smart health care industry for the elderly, and "one small" mainly refers to artificial intelligence education. It has developed a through-type artificial intelligence education solution covering preschool, elementary school, junior high school, high school, and vocational school.

In 2017, UBTECH began to pay attention to the elderly care track, and later established a research and development center focusing on health care products and core technologies, and established a health business department in June 2021. In August this year, UBTECH released a one-stop solution for the entire system of smart health care for the first time.

According to UBTECH, this solution includes 5 service robots and 1 health care cloud platform, covering six major scenarios: service operation, life care, security, memory care, mental needs, and medical rehabilitation. The five robots have been intelligently improved in terms of ergonomic design and interaction methods, and can meet the various care and care needs of the elderly, such as travel, picking up objects, rehabilitation training, and psychological companionship.

Smart health care is no longer a new topic. Due to the serious aging of many countries and the lack of care workers, as early as the second half of the 20th century, many robots focusing on rehabilitation, nursing, and companionship effects were launched overseas. But until now, the role of service robots in the health care industry is still weak, and there is still a long way to go before large-scale commercial applications.

In China, there are not many companies focusing on health care robot-related businesses. Although there is a great social demand for the health care industry, according to an incomplete review by Jiemian News, there are only about 100 companies that manufacture robots for rehabilitation, companionship and nursing, and even less than half of them have obtained financing, and no products have been put into large-scale implementation.

"The elderly group has very strong particularity, and it is conceivable that there will be difficulties in the actual promotion process." Zhang Chengkun said that the reason why many products failed in the past was that they were not designed based on the real demands of users. More commonly, companies already have a certain product, and in order to expand new application scenarios, they thought of the elderly care industry.

A typical example is that some food delivery robots delivered to health care scenarios were originally designed to save labor, but because many elderly people have limited range of limb movement, some find it difficult to stand up, or even bend down, and the food delivery robots originally designed for healthy and energetic groups, the height of their plates cannot meet the operating needs of elderly people with limited movements. After taking the meal, the elderly need to stand up and confirm on the interactive screen.

Due to the inadequate design of these details, it is difficult for the elderly to complete the full set of operations, which has become the focus of UBTECH's improvement when designing robots.

On the other hand, many nursing homes only have single products to choose from when purchasing robots, and the functions of single robots are generally limited. It is difficult to systematically solve the rich needs of the elderly, and the data cannot be linked and integrated. Therefore, UBTECH chose to launch an integrated full-system solution including robots, IoT hardware, and cloud platforms.

Zhang Chengkun mentioned that currently only 7% of the country chooses community-based elderly care, 3% chooses institutional elderly care, and the vast majority of the elderly still choose home-based elderly care. Considering this background, UBTECH established a trinity model of institutions, homes, and communities when it initially planned its business. The three scenarios are connected to each other, the service data is integrated, and finally the cloud platform is used for unified scheduling and management.

According to UBTECH's idea, once this model is connected, it can improve multiple links in the health care industry. For example, patients recovering after orthopedic surgery can first be provided with rehabilitation exercises, meal delivery, psychological companionship and other services by rehabilitation robots in community hospitals during their recuperation; if there are more urgent needs, they can be connected to the hospital in real time through the cloud platform. The relevant data of hospital diagnosis and treatment can also be saved on the cloud platform and fed back to the community and family for daily monitoring reminders and data synchronization.

But this requires enough communities and institutions to join UBTECH's ecosystem. Zhang Chengkun revealed that the above solution has been implemented in Shenzhen Shekou Merchants Guanyi Home, Shanghai Songjiang Xinkai Nursing Home, Hong Kong University Shenzhen Hospital and Shandong Taishan Sanatorium and other elderly care operations and medical institutions, and will be further expanded in the future.

Of course, it still takes a long process from robot-assisted labor to robot-replacing labor. In UBTECH's view, the implementation of the solution is only the first step. To allow artificial intelligence technology to solve the core needs of the elderly care industry at a lower cost and more accurately requires the joint efforts of the entire industry and the ecological chain.