Hello everyone, good evening and welcome to my new channel—How to Utilize AI in Smart Hardware.
Regarding the third direction of AI toys, the elderly direction. This direction is also a field that all industries are unlikely to ignore, which is elderly care. The AI applications in elderly care, especially when combined with hardware, actually have very significant differences.
One direction is to combine hardware to help elderly people solve their care issues. For example, difficulties in getting in and out of bed, or difficulties in eating, etc. The inability to take care of oneself is one direction, while the other direction is companionship for the elderly. Chatting with the elderly, discussing their interests, reciting novels, telling jokes, and so on.
However, these two directions differ in terms of implementation difficulty and market scale. In terms of implementation difficulty, the first direction is actually very challenging because it needs to integrate many scenarios. For instance, when an elderly person gets out of bed, the height of the bed and the weight of the elderly person are both issues. Therefore, from the hardware perspective, it requires very mature robotic solutions to address these challenges, making the implementation very difficult.
But the market scale is very large, as the aging population in China and globally is expected to grow significantly in the future. On the other hand, if we consider the companionship aspect for the elderly, I believe this path is actually not feasible. Why? Because the real issue that confuses elderly people is not the lack of companionship, but rather the feeling of having no value in society. That is the essence of the problem. Even if there is someone to accompany them, it does not solve their fundamental issue, which is that they feel they have lost their value in this world. Therefore, I do not believe the second direction is viable.
If we can find ways to help elderly people regain their value through social interactions, then that direction would be truly interesting.