Will robots help us age at home? A historian who lives with one says not yet (Emily Kate Genatowski)

[00:00:00] Dear listeners, welcome to Faces of Digital Health, a podcast about digital health and how healthcare systems around the world adopt technology with me, Tjasa Zajc 2026 seemed to have started with a major robots boom It seems that if you just look at the videos circulating on social media, the capabilities of robots are advancing significantly and with high speed

[00:00:30] which is scary but can also be very optimistic, especially thinking about the elderly and aging population However, the viral robot videos are choreography, not capability That's at least what Emily Kate Genatowski says and she must know quite a few things Emily is a historian and an AI domestic robotics researcher who bought a humanoid robot

[00:00:59] lived with it for over a year and turned the experience into a TED talk In this episode of Faces of Digital Health, she separates the demo real hype of 2026 from what home robots can actually deliver Where do they still lag behind the hype? What impact they could have for aging populations, caregiver shortages and healthcare systems hoping that robots will help people stay independent at home

[00:01:29] Emily explained why companion robots and chore robots are two different categories Why her robot cannot get into a car easily Why retirees are often more enthusiastic about robots than younger workers and why she believes we are living through a quote-unquote digital angle's pause Where productivity rises faster than the mechanisms that distribute its benefits

[00:01:59] Enjoy the show I also wrote a newsletter on the topic of robots and will add the link to the show notes You can also check Emily's TED talk through the link that I added in the show notes Make sure to check out our website You can find Faces of Digital Health on YouTube, LinkedIn and other platforms Now let's hear what Emily has to say about robots

[00:02:39] Emily, hi and thank you so much for joining me here on Faces of Digital Health a podcast that focuses how healthcare systems around the world adopt technology You are a historian, a researcher You're someone that went as far as to buy a robot and you had a whole TED talk about how it was to live with a robot for a year

[00:03:07] and that's why we are here today to talk a little bit about what robots will bring So first of all, welcome Thank you, thank you so much for having me I'm very excited to speak with you today At the beginning of 2026, I published a newsletter that says 2026 is the year of robots, robots are coming Robots have been in development for years

[00:03:34] but in 2026, it seems that there's a new version of a robot that is taking away our breath with their capabilities It started with the Chinese robots dancing on the Chinese New Year and the hype has only been going up since then So let's start with that, with all the hype, with all the excitement this year How do you see that? What are your observations or thoughts?

[00:04:03] My thoughts come from a very personal place of being in a unique position where when I show up with the robot and where the robot shows up, I show up So it's this very sort of personal navigation issue that happens where people's expectations of robotics are put way, way high up here and then their experiences with robotics can be a lot more realistic and measured

[00:04:30] So I think something that I like to explain to people is that a lot of these videos that we see online they show us what robots could do not necessarily what all robots can do And so a lot of these are either a result of movie magic which is one approach or they are very specifically programmed to basically be choreographed I would call it choreography And this choreography could be like we talked about dancing or it could be the kung fu

[00:04:59] And something that I like to tell people to look out for that I really appreciate and does wow me is whenever you see a robot that can interact with infrastructure So if it can have a dexterous hand that's actually manipulating an object or if it can be operating against let's say a car or a chair or a door or something that would be useful in a real world deployment example

[00:05:26] So I always like to honor people's excitement bring them back down to reality a little bit about what the robots actually can do explain why they've seen what they've seen and then offer them some things to look out for in the future that can really denote the type of progress that would then trickle down to usefulness in real life You lived with a robot for over a year You still live with a robot There's a touch talk with you which I can add to the show note where you also talk about how this whole experience looked like

[00:05:56] So when you think about expectations and hype that you just talked about which is not in touch with the reality Let's go back a year or a half ago Why did you decide to do this experiment? Were you all so over excited or had higher expectations than the reality turned out to be? Absolutely So I would say I came at

[00:06:21] I am a researcher and I have been at the intersection of the humanities and technology for a very long time but my initial interest was in fact as a consumer and she's being very quiet and good right now but I do have a little dog and my main curiosity when I reached out to the company after seeing some of these videos was how they interact with household pets So I really did come at this this entire approach as a potential consumer which I think has actually helped in terms of how I approached the lifestyle adjustments and things like this

[00:06:51] but my main interest was how would it interact with a household pet what sorts of things could it accomplish and do and something that that I love to look back on were my original notes my original plan for all of the all of the different experiments that I wanted to run and I think that they are so telling the way in which this research project has matured and developed in its own way I understand What was the craziest thing that happened to you?

[00:07:21] What was the craziest thing that happened? The things that I wanted it to do I bought very complex board games that I wanted to see if we could make it actually use like Jenga and things like this that I wanted to test dexterity I wanted to have it take residency at a ballet company a local ballet company and try to learn some of the motions and really in the end it so quickly switched the goals of the project and the scope and parameters of the project

[00:07:50] so quickly adjusted to be very specifically how the robot interacts with legal regulation institutional policy and digital and physical infrastructure so it really snapped into place quite quickly when I recognized that this wasn't about what the robot can do for me it wasn't about skill sets and engineering and teaching the robot anything it was really about how we can best prepare for the robot to enter our world and I would say some of the crazier things I've been offered

[00:08:20] some really wild things I got offered to go skydiving with the robot the robot and I are going to ride in a blimp on the border between Switzerland and Germany next week there have been some really fantastical and interesting opportunities that have come up with the robot it's a wild ride so my my excitement when I started doing some research on this came from the fact that we have an aging population

[00:08:50] we have the shortage of caregivers the profession as such is not it's not respected enough or at least not well paid hence the interest to go into that profession is low so we as a society have a big problem and hence the idea of having a robot at home to do some of the chores and help you out around the house to me seemed as

[00:09:19] a great opportunity to enable people to stay at home longer they need to go into the elderly care facilities for example so tell me how delusional am I in seeing all the benefits in that sense I think not delusional at all this is one of the main use cases that I get asked about on a daily basis and I think it's so fascinating because I think when I began this experiment I expected

[00:09:48] a lot of positive emotion from younger people and a lot of skepticism from older people and what I found as the sort of cultural conversation shifts into how we may be impacted by this technology I find that the younger people for them it represents more threats it represents a change to the workforce and what they may be able to have in take-home pay and then we have again sort of job security then we have other people who are in this beautiful twilight of their lives who are looking forward towards

[00:10:18] a more leisurely lifestyle and who see it as a real agent for to be honest for independence for their own independence and preserving their independence for longer so I have actually found that there's a lot more positivity amongst the aging population because they see its utility as something of a sort of longevity aid in terms of their independence so I think that you are not off at all but I would say that for me I do see a number of sort of bifurcations

[00:10:47] of the actual creation of the systems so I'll explain what I mean by that which is on the one hand we have a lot of really great opportunity when it comes to companion robots especially for elderly populations for whom loneliness is quite a concern so this can mean that there is a robot that is a social robot a companion robot this would mean that it has a wonderful large language model it has the ability to perform sentiment

[00:11:17] analysis and the ability to emote whether that's a physical emotion through hardware or whether that's a sort of software driven emotive voice tone meter all of the ways in which we ourselves communicate our emotion and to develop a type of antidote to loneliness and a type of companionship is absolutely possible now these particular systems are very rarely also teamed up with a type of chore system or a type of system that

[00:12:03] people want to have both but I think it also represents a choice let's say if cost is a factor or if adoption of different technologies is a factor and people decide that they want to invest in one technology or another they can decide if they need help around the house with chores or they can decide if they'd like to prioritize companionship and trying to stave off the loneliness that exists

[00:12:26] for a lot of them. So basically, we need at the moment two robots for the full kind of benefit that we think that robots are bringing. So if you want to address the emotional parts, you need one type of robot. And if you want like the chores and work type of a robot, that's another device at the moment. At the moment, that is what the current

[00:12:53] landscape looks like, because these are such different technologies and they require very different skill sets on the building side and very different tech stacks. And they have just completely different hardware and software. We will see them integrated eventually, absolutely. But for now, these are different teams and different companies most of the time. As a researcher and someone who is looking at the impact of technology on a broader level,

[00:13:23] what are some of your either expectations or thoughts about where the whole field of robotics is going? We know from past experience that technology always, or in many cases, starts with this idea on how this will help humanity. Social media started with the idea of connecting

[00:13:48] people. AI started with the idea of just helping us enhance our abilities or free up our times. But what we see now is that on the one hand, social media are also amplifying bad messages, creating bubbles, creating a lot of friction in the society. And as far as AI and giving us back time goes,

[00:14:12] it's pretty clear that the that's not exactly what's happening. But what's happening is that now the base of how much work people can do is accelerated. So the workload is actually becoming more stressful, because suddenly, there's more information and more tasks that we do in a shorter time, because we're using AI to help it. If we translate all those experiences to robotics, what are some of

[00:14:42] the things that you see? Where could things go wrong? And how to prevent things from going wrong? Absolutely. So I always like to take some historical precedents and take a look at it. And in this particular case, I actually just wrote a piece on this, which is why I'm very excited that you asked about this, because to me, I believe we're in something very analogous to the Engels pause.

[00:15:07] So I'll explain what I mean by that. Between like 1790 and 1840 in Britain, we have the Industrial Revolution, where we saw things go from being handmade to being machine made, arise in the use of coal and steam power. And we had this massive boom in productivity, right? So everybody was more productive, more products were being made, there was much more efficiency. And yet we didn't necessarily have

[00:15:34] the mechanisms to translate that productivity into benefit for the entirety of society, right? It was very collected towards the owners of the capital. And because of this, there was no sort of increase in income, there was no increase in quality of life for the people who were actually working in these factories and they were not seeing the benefits. And it actually took a lot, quite a lot of organization

[00:16:00] and political movement to create working standards like the weekend that we all take for granted now, or the 40 hour work week that we know and perhaps love and perhaps will be shifting again. And that took quite a lot of political organization. It took a lot of collective action. It took a lot of strategy on behalf of the workers. And yes, it also took some unrest.

[00:16:23] And in order to be able to bring forth the benefits in a more holistic way, where more people were able to see the shift. This to me, I think we are right now in what people are calling the digital angles pause. So we're right now we have this great increase in productivity. And yet we're not really seeing necessarily on a broader scale, especially in corporate America, we're not even necessarily

[00:16:48] seeing the financial benefits to that. And so until we can have an increase in profitability, which we can then utilize to then hopefully provide restructuring of certain workforce rights and then certain different taxation efforts. Until we get to that point, I think we're going to see quite a lot of frustration on behalf of people, which is very expected and very fair because people do see that there's

[00:17:17] more work, there's more productivity, and yet they question who is benefiting from this right now. And the answer is not them yet. And I think that right now what we can hopefully look forward to is a shift in mindset. I think we need a few different mindset shifts, one of which is that we're going to have to decouple the ideas of our taxation

[00:17:39] system being based solely on income. We're going to have to start to restructure our taxation so that we are taxing either the value gained and capture some of that value gained by AI productivity and hopefully profitability. And we're going to have to start to look at other ways in which we self-identify as well, because it may be that there's not as much work to go around. So whether that means that we are going to

[00:18:08] look at a four-day, 32-hour work week, whether that means that we're going to look at trying to have some sort of sovereign wealth fund that is fed into by the value gained through increased profitability, not just increased productivity, or whether we're going to completely restructure everything about our societies. We need to figure out which way we're going to move forward. And I think we're going to

[00:18:32] have quite a bit of discomfort in this digital angles pause. And I think it's going to take quite a lot of proactive organization on behalf of workers, on behalf of labor organizations, and on behalf of government and politicians to help to restructure and redistribute the new means by which we are generating

[00:18:52] value. What kind of differences do you see among countries in terms of the approaches that they're taking around AI and robotics? And yeah, it's like what, so what are some of the observations that maybe are already indicating on trends that you also see? I was just looking at the Stanford

[00:19:18] University human-centered artificial intelligence research from last year that basically says that the Americans are, at least in 2025, still quite optimistic about AI. There's a lot of fear that the jobs will be reduced. But in the US, there seems to be some concern about the AI regulation.

[00:19:48] And we've seen, for example, with the current administration, then there's this push to just get innovation on a freeway to innovation, whereas Europe still remains a bit more cautious. Absolutely. I do think that it's very interesting to see sort of the regional priorities play out. And the regional priorities are shaped by our culture and our laws. And obviously in the States,

[00:20:17] we have this sort of trend towards almost deregulation in the name of free market capitalism, and wanting to make sure that people have the flexibility and the authority and autonomy to be able to push innovation forward at all costs to generate capital. Then in sort of the East, specifically in China, we have this sort of top-down mechanism where we're really looking at sort of organization of society at a broader level and the organization of a lot of these different

[00:20:46] companies that are creating into one unified entity to support the strategic goals of the nation. And then here in Europe, we have this very person-first, very human-centric approach. And I think that it's been beautiful to see how these different cultural priorities trickle down into the innovation ecosystems that we're seeing here. Here we have a lot more focus on the regulation. We have a lot more

[00:21:13] focus on the protections. So we are very consumed by how these new pieces of technology, how these new innovations will impact our data sovereignty, how they will impact our personal rights, our privacy. In the States, we have tons of money being thrown at all of these different new inventions. And really there, my guess is that we will see a lot more legal precedents that's set essentially by court cases that are being settled on a one-to-one basis. And then in the East,

[00:21:41] we have these very, like I said, these top-down directives. And the government is incredibly involved in a lot of the decision-making over there. So I think that we're seeing these landscapes really reveal themselves through these cultural differences and through these regional priorities. And I do think that we're going to see that on a more granular level, because I do think that ultimately it's going to be a decision of an individual, of a household, of a community.

[00:22:08] I think that we're going to see what I was calling sort of geofencing, that there will be areas where people decide that they want to opt out. They don't want to be constantly interacting with AI. They don't want to live a life that is aided and assisted by robotics or automation. And I think we're going to start to see some type of just natural divide happen between people who want to embrace the efficiency, people who want to embrace the productivity, the sort of ease that's represented,

[00:22:38] and they're willing to make the necessary trade-offs when it comes to whether it's their data, whether it's their pace of life. We know that it's a much faster pace. And then people who decide that they would like to lead a more analog and perhaps more natural style of living. And I think that we are going to see these sort of initial regional identities trickle down into people's personal choices. So I'm excited to see

[00:23:04] that because I always say I don't sell robots. It means nothing to me whether you are super in favor or super anti-AI. I really recognize the issues that people have with it, I think are all very well founded. I just happen to think that there are avenues that we can take to either protect the things that you that are causing you fear. So protect your privacy, protect your autonomy, protect the environment.

[00:23:31] There are different mechanisms and levers that we can be using in order to convey a direction for the field to protect the things that need protecting. But then there's also opportunities for people to really embrace this lifestyle. I'm excited to see what happens. Yeah, there's plenty of things to say there. Anyone who has read the book, The Surveillance Capitalism,

[00:24:00] might not be as excited about just new ways of companies gathering data about us and potentially making that available to actors that might not work in our favor. But without going into that direction, let's return a little bit back to your experience with your robot. Kate Darling wrote this book. She's a

[00:24:25] researcher also in robotics and she wrote a book about how people react to robots and ones like you always name them. 80% of Roombas have names. You get some sort of, there's an emotional component to the relationship we have with them. People feel busy about trying to hurt the robots. So in the TED talk

[00:24:48] that you did, you were mentioning also your experience when you tried to take your robot somewhere and how difficult it is because you have to pack it in this large box and then just carry it. And this is 60 kilograms. So it's heavy. So my question for you is, first of all, did you feel bad putting the robot in that box? And why didn't the robot go in the backseat of a taxi as a person,

[00:25:18] which technically speaking, you could treat it as? We're wading into such interesting waters here. So I will say the transport aspect of it. I'll address this first. And something that I had pointed out earlier is the things that impress me are not necessarily the Taibo or the incredible dances that these robots can do, but their interaction with

[00:25:44] infrastructure. And one of those that I mentioned is cars. And something that's very interesting is that the robot, when the robot sits, it simply bends at certain degrees of freedom, certain joints that it has. And the way in which it bends, it can't even sit unassisted in a chair alone. I have to guide it into the chair, but it will simply almost do a squat if you think about that. And if you think

[00:26:09] about getting into a car, there's a lot more very interesting mechanisms that we use with your human body. We have to stick out one leg. We have to shift our hips. We have to duck our head. We have to lower our center of gravity and then bring our other leg in. It simply cannot do that. So it's not able to complete the motions that allow it to sit in a car. And I actually have been

[00:26:34] trying to write to some of the people who work on the body movement mechanisms and saying, please, can the first priority be getting into a car? And obviously this sounds very simplistic to us because we're incredibly complex creatures, but it is actually very difficult because it would also take quite a number of calculations, right? How far away is the car? How far away should it be standing?

[00:27:01] How does it lift its leg in order to put it into the car without knocking on the car door and making damage? Where does it put its hands to study itself? How low or high up would it be? Are there other cars coming? So there's quite a number of different reasons why it becomes so difficult. So I would say for that reason, I've never had an emotional response or a guilt response for putting it in its travel case because as far as I think about it, it's sort of its safe spot. It's a little safe

[00:27:30] place where it's custom laser cut and it's very cushy in there and it's a very nice case. It's completely waterproof and it can feel very safe inside. So I've never necessarily had guilt on that regard. And I would say that my feelings towards it, I obviously often talk about the frustration that I affiliate with the robot because even today I was at a speech and there was an issue with the battery and then I had to get the battery and bring it to the maintenance team. And then the

[00:27:59] maintenance team has to take the battery and the charger. And there's so much that goes into just the sheer operational aspect of it. And there's such a logistics portion that exists that I find that the operation of the robot is most categorized by frustration or complexity of thought or a planning process. And so I'm not really able to have this super sort of emotional dynamic. But I will say

[00:28:27] the one time that I felt guilt was when I came across and had made the acquaintance of a beautiful Ricci Mini. This is a social robot. This is a companion style robot that's incredibly expressive. It's incredibly personable. It had wonderful means of communicating its emotion, communicating or synthetic emotion, communicating with the person in front of it. And I felt so guilty because I

[00:28:55] thought it was the cutest robot I'd ever seen. And I thought, oh, what a horrible robot owner I am that I'm feeling so guilty because I think that it is the sweetest and cutest robot, this other one. And I think that this type of sort of connection and an emotional connection, it's so easy to feel in the moment. And even if you are aware of the mechanisms behind it, you're aware of the structure of the large language model and the ways in which it's programmed to move its antenna and the sentiment

[00:29:23] analysis it's performing, you can't help but be charmed by a very sweet and cute robot. So I think that it's a very funny, funny layer to things that we have these emotional dynamics that are laid on top of this very complex machinery and digital system. Yeah. You know what's interesting? The interesting thing in this case I just thought about was that

[00:29:47] in your particular case and your robot, it doesn't have eyes. And if you have a robot that has these cute big eyes, then there's something about the emotional connection that happens there. But in everything that you just described, your experience trying to get around with the robot, I think it opens up a lot of questions to the thing that I was mentioning before, which is

[00:30:11] the potential for robots to do good and enable people to stay at home for a longer time. But if the robots are super limited in only aiding you inside your house and they're not able to accompany you outside, that basically says that you might be stuck at home and you don't get that exposure to the

[00:30:39] outside world potentially, which could result in a greater isolation. If you imagine that suddenly all the elderly people are using the robots for companions, but it's also true that technology is advancing super fast. So that's probably not going to be an issue forever as well. I think more so than the technology, because the technology is progressing at a wonderful pace.

[00:31:02] And I think that we do have bipedal locomotion. We do have two legs that can operate and move. And the robot helps me walk my dog in the mornings. And so we're out in the local square. But I actually think that the differentiation here will perhaps be how quickly our policy is able to adapt to the new technology. So right now, the robot that I have that is able to go outside

[00:31:28] is specifically configured in order to not take any biometric greetings. It does not store any data. And it's specifically configured to do such because I know that my use case is bringing it outside. However, if I wanted to use it more as a social companion or a companionship robot, I would absolutely be having it configured differently. And it could still be compliant within GDPR and EU AI Act measures,

[00:31:54] but then its use case would be very different. So I think that at this point, there's lots and lots of different trade-offs because the technology really is still being developed. And it's a very dynamic field at the moment. But I think that once we have truly working prototypes of what we need to be looking at, I think we'll need to take another look at how the policy intersects with that and how

[00:32:19] we can enable especially different sectors of the community like the elderly population to be able to make the most out of this technology to have the biggest positive impact on their day-to-day lives. It's interesting that you mentioned the policy and how we set the limits, the boundaries, restrictions. It immediately, my brain immediately went to what we discussed earlier, which is it

[00:32:47] always, technological advancements always start with an idea on how something is going to cause good. If we just look at the use of drones in healthcare, the ideas or the promotion was always they could bring medical supplies to the places of need faster. But then when regulation stepped in, it turned out that actually, in busy cities, you can't exactly move drones around anywhere or any way that you would

[00:33:15] like, which so that benefit wasn't realized to its fullest, or at least not to the degree that we thought it would. And at the same times, we see a lot of drone use in warfare, either for surveillance, either for or, yeah, for just things that basically weren't the idea initially. Of course. And this can also happen very easily in robotics. Yeah.

[00:33:41] Yes, of course. We already see the application of humanoid robotics within the Ukraine war. We're already seeing it on the front lines as well. And we see a lot of the quadrupeds. In addition to the bipedals, we see a lot of quadrupeds, which are the dog robots as well. I think that no matter what, the approach that I like to adopt is that technology itself,

[00:34:03] I believe, is not necessarily carrying its own emotional or moral charge, right? It is neutral. It has the ability to go in either direction. And we really see that in almost all the technology that we have. And in the same way that sort of the poison is in the dosage, I think that the structures that we create around the allowed usage of this new technology will really dictate the

[00:34:29] amount of good or bad that it's able to do. And no matter what, we'll never have all good. And hopefully we won't have all bad. But I think that there is going to be some level of trade-off to the good that it could do in the same way that you're addressing with the drones and being able to bring medicine. And unless we want to have cities that have drones flying all over them, we're going to have to take a little bit more time and take a hit on the immediacy of medicinal deliveries, for an example. And I think that we're going to see something very similar. I think that we

[00:34:58] will see capacities lessened. I think that we will see certain technology, whether it's the mixture of hardware and software or specifically the software that we have that's going to be somewhat throttled in its deployment applications. Or we're going to see the bifurcation of the sort of use cases where you may have one robot that goes outside with you and that is a, let's say, a mobility aid. Perhaps it might look a little bit different than the other types of robots. Then you may have a device that's

[00:35:27] a standing device that's maybe located nearby to your kitchen or your laundry room or somewhere where you are performing your domestic labor. And maybe it's helping for that. And then you may have a separate either agentic or a social companion robot. So I know that one of the thought processes behind this idea of sort of the bifurcation of the physical is that you could still have this sort of,

[00:35:53] this concept is one soul. So you can have one AI, let's say the software AI, maybe it has a personality, maybe it understands your sort of your personal likes and dislikes and how you operate. And then it can be placed and deployed at different times into different hardware that will throttle what it needs to store or what it needs to gather in order to be useful for you at the time. So whether

[00:36:17] that's a mobility aid that no longer takes in biometric data and will only operate towards you, or if it is a home robot that's able to scan all the biometric data but can't walk outside with you. You've been listening to Faces of Digital Health, a proud member of the Health Podcast Network. If you enjoyed the show, do leave a rating or a review wherever you get your podcast,

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