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The nursing home’s inhabitants have greeted the robots with curiosity. One of the machines, an egg-shaped robot about the size of a small child, urges the elderly to perform physical exercises like raising their arms in synch with the its own movements.

“It’s the most difficult thing, raising your arms. It requires a lot of concentration,” says Kaarina Hakkarainen, who has tested the robots for a couple of weeks.

During the autumn, the Kustaankartano nursing home will see if the three robots will prove to be good at entertaining the elderly and helping them train their memory.

In addition to the egg-shaped machine, there are two bigger robots which resemble heads on wheels. Clad in dainty outfits and blinking their large eyes in a vaguely friendly fashion, the robots burst into a rendition of Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsody when they were presented to the public.

“Undeniably, they look very peculiar—perhaps their big eyes are part of Asian culture. And, probably, they were meant to look gentle, since there’s all kinds of technology-related fear,” says Arja Peiponen, Elderly Services Director at the City of Helsinki.

A replacement for nurses?

In addition to South Korea, Finland and Denmark are testing out the robots. Peiponen says that Finland has been selected as one of the pilot countries thanks to its tech-savvy citizenry and quality welfare services.

Organisers maintain that the elder care bots have not been brought in to replace nurses.

“We need the technology so that nurses’ hands free up for other tasks,” Peiponen says. “By trying out the technology, we will be prepared for how it can help our clients.”

However some fear that robots will eventually take on a nurse’s role.

“I accept the robots in the sense that maybe they can help to keep memory in good order, but I’m afraid that these robots will in the future come to replace humans,” says Kaarina Hakkarainen.