Can a seal robot relieve depression in dementia patients?

Cristina Garcia Married

Salamanca, (EFE).- The PARO seal, the most famous of social robots, responds to caresses and looks at you if you talk to it, a tool on which the largest Spanish study will now be carried out to see if it can alleviate depression in dementia patients.

The State Reference Center for Alzheimer’s and other dementias (CREA), based in Salamanca, is preparing a study to assess whether this therapeutic robot can contribute to improving the “psychological symptoms” of the disease.

“Throughout dementia, all patients experience one or more of these symptoms. Depression, anxiety, agitation, which are a big problem for them and for those who care for them, because they are difficult to manage,” Enrique Pérez, head of research at CREA, explained to Efe.

The harp seal robot “PARO” was created more than 20 years ago by the Japanese engineer Takanori Shibata, but it has a high price of around 6,000 euros.

There are several studies in other countries in which it has been proven that it can be effective both in dementia and for older people alone or hospitalized children, but the CREA research aspires to be the reference in the Spanish context.

“In Spain there are very few studies on this robot and they do not have the sample size that we intend to achieve. We want to check if what they have corroborated in other countries also occurs in our culture”, indicated Pérez.

Why is it a seal?

The idea for the PARO robot was to replace animal therapy in situations where caring for a living being is expensive or impossible, but Shibata did not resort to shaping it into a dog or cat, as might be expected.

“He decided that it was a seal so that there were no expectations of operation. We don’t know how a seal behaves, so you don’t perceive the difference with reality, something that would be more difficult with a dog, for example”, explained the CREA research director.

The seal robot is already used in some Spanish centers, but “it is not so widespread” because its cost is high. CREA has one, since 2009, donated by the Queen Sofia Foundation.

“We have been using it with people with dementia, precisely what we are trying to see in our study is whether using the seal can reduce the consumption of psychotropic drugs that are used to treat these disorders, which have high costs, side effects and do not always give results” Perez has indicated.

Study in centers throughout Spain

CREA expects to have at least 40 people in the group that uses the robot and 40 in the control group. The participants will all be people with dementia in a mild or moderate phase from centers throughout Spain.

The study is expected to last six months, three of treatment and three of follow-up. The objective is to also evaluate how long the effects of using the robot last, to determine the duration of future therapies.

The PARO harp seal “is like a stuffed animal”, it has multiple sound, light and temperature sensors, which allow it to show “emotions” by opening its eyes or making pleasant sounds, in addition to learning the preferences of the user and even the name they give it. EFE