As the aging population deepens, traditional elderly care models face numerous challenges. Elderly care robots, such as companion robots, rehabilitation robots, and AI medical assistants, empowered by artificial intelligence (AI), are gradually coming into the public eye as emerging technological solutions, showcasing enormous market potential and development prospects. Since the beginning of this year, the topic of “robotic elderly care” has gained significant traction, with some predicting that the era of robotic elderly care is upon us.
Robotic elderly care refers to the systematic solution that utilizes robots and embodied intelligence technology to provide services such as daily living assistance, health monitoring, rehabilitation training, and emotional companionship for the elderly. Its core goal is to bridge the gap in human caregiving through technological means, enhance the quality of life for the elderly, and reduce social elderly care costs.
The application scenarios for elderly care robots generally include hospitals at all levels, wellness centers, nursing homes, and elderly households.These application scenarios currently have actual operational cases in the country.Currently, the elderly care robot industry is facing tremendous development opportunities. According to data from the Ministry of Civil Affairs, by the end of 2024, the population aged 60 and above in China will reach 310 million, accounting for 22% of the total population. Among this large elderly population, 11.6% (approximately 36 million people) have lost the ability to care for themselves and require long-term care. The strong demand for elderly care services places higher demands on market service supply, providing significant market space for the development of the elderly care robot industry. Data from Founder Securities Research Center shows that in recent years, the penetration rate of intelligent robots in the elderly care field has been continuously increasing, and the market size has been expanding. In 2023, the market size reached 25 billion yuan. It is expected that in the coming years, the elderly care robot market will maintain a compound annual growth rate of 15%, reaching a market size of 66 billion yuan by 2030.
Despite the attractive market prospects and some achievements in industry development, elderly care robots still face numerous problems and challenges in commercialization and large-scale application. For instance, high-quality elderly care data, which is a focus of the industry, remains scarce. The research and application of elderly care robots require not only the collection of clinical data from medical institutions but also the long-term collection of behavioral data from the elderly. The collection and annotation of this data require time and high costs. From a technical perspective, current service robots have weak capabilities in real-time perception, decision-making, and execution in unstructured complex scenarios, which cannot meet the daily living needs of the elderly. From a market perspective, the research and development costs of elderly care robots are currently high, especially for cutting-edge technologies such as embodied intelligence, which require substantial financial and human resources. Without the ability to dilute costs through large-scale production and bulk sales, the prices of elderly care robots remain high (even cheaper nursing robots are priced above 10,000 yuan, while fully functional high-end robots can cost tens of thousands of yuan), hindering their spread from the industrial sector to the consumer market. Additionally, many consumers have doubts about the functionality, value, and safety of intelligent elderly care robots, and market awareness and acceptance need to be improved.
In the face of a trillion-yuan market blue ocean, solving these obstacles and promoting the sustainable development of the elderly care robot industry requires collaborative efforts from both policy and industry sides. The government should enhance top-level design and strengthen policy support for the elderly care robot industry. On the technical side, establishing special industrial funds to support core technology research and development projects, providing more support for companies developing elderly care robots; promoting the integration of industry, academia, and research, supporting school-enterprise cooperation to tackle key technologies, and accelerating the transformation of results. In terms of application scenarios, diversifying community elderly care and developing product services to meet the diverse needs of the elderly. At the same time, improving the standard system, strengthening supervision, strict certification testing, eliminating outdated and low-quality products, and regulating market order.
Relevant enterprises should increase research and development efforts, targeting the pain points and needs of different elderly care scenarios for precise technological breakthroughs. Strengthening safety and reliability testing of robots in institutional settings to ensure they meet strict medical care standards. Collecting data through actual use to continuously optimize and improve the basic functions of the robots. Optimizing product design and manufacturing processes to improve production efficiency, and conducting large-scale production and supply chain optimization to reduce product costs.
It is believed that through the formulation of scientifically reasonable development strategies, advancing technology breakthroughs and market expansion in stages and with focus, the intelligent elderly care robot industry can achieve a leap from pilot applications to large-scale popularization, allowing more elderly individuals to enjoy the convenience and benefits brought by technological progress.
Source: China Quality News Network, Hu Libiao