Health systems around the world are facing mounting pressures due to aging populations, shortages of health-care professionals and increasingly complex care requirements. Long-term care (LTC) homes are a critical component of the health system: for older adults with complex care needs, they provide their residents with 24-hour nursing care and assistance with daily living. Although $6.8 billion has been allocated to fund 627 LTC homes in Ontario, health-care analysts believe an additional $1.8 billion would be needed to adequately staff them (Canadian Center for Policy Alternatives, Government of Ontario) and there are calls to urgently address this staffing crisis (Government of Ontario). Given these shortages, current LTC staff have to limit the time they spend with residents to simply attending to their basic clinical care needs.
Due to the structural constraints endemic to LTC environments, residents often experience limited opportunities for meaningful social interaction, reduced contact with their family and friends, and barriers to social engagement. As a result, they are at greater risk of social isolation and loneliness, a fact that became especially visible during the COVID-19 pandemic when visitors were not allowed.
But social isolation due to inadequate social activity and loneliness among LTC residents has been associated with a range of adverse health outcomes, including depression, cognitive decline, reduced mobility and increased mortality. While staff work tirelessly to care for residents, the need to prioritize residents’ clinical care and safety needs frequently leaves limited the time needed to address residents’ social and emotional well-being. The gap between residents’ social needs and the available resources that can address them underscores the importance of exploring innovative solutions to promote meaningful social engagement in LTC settings.
This is why Professor Mirou Jaana has received funding from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research Project Grant Program for her project titled “Companions in Care: Benefits and Challenges of Social Robotics in Long-Term Care.”
Leveraging social robots in long-term care
Social robots, such as interactive robots that resemble teddy bears, baby seals, dogs or even humans that mimic human interactions, represent a promising innovation in health-care delivery. Designed to interact with users in socially meaningful ways while supporting the work of healthcare professionals, these robots offer companionship and social interaction through conversation, music, games and personalized interactions. This may help reduce feelings of loneliness and promote emotional well-being.
Jaana and her team explore how social robots can help address the social isolation and loneliness experienced by LTC residents by complementing, rather than replacing, interactions between residents and staff. Their research will be conducted over four years and will assess the feasibility of deploying social robots, along with best practices in such deployments, and how effective the robots will be in encouraging social engagement and responsive behaviour, reducing agitation and depression, and improving quality of life outcomes for LTC residents.
Crucially, this research does not position social robots as substitutes for recreation aides, personal support workers, nurses or other health-care professionals. Instead, social robots are envisioned as tools to enhance existing care models. By taking on supportive and social tasks, robots can alleviate some of the increasing non-clinical demands placed on staff, allowing health-care professionals to focus their time and expertise where it is most needed. In this way, social robots function as collaborators within the care environment, without compromising human compassion and clinical judgement.
Ultimately, this work addresses a pressing health system problem: how to deliver high-quality, resident-centred care in LTC homes amidst mounting resource constraints and growing demand for LTC services. By targeting social isolation, which has profound health implications for residents, social robots may offer an innovative and scalable solution that helps improve residents’ quality of life. By working closely with LTC homes to translate knowledge and disseminate research findings across the sector, Jaana and her team will contribute to a growing body of evidence that demonstrates that technological innovations can play a meaningful role in addressing the pressures in our health-care system, in improving care to residents, and in supporting the work of health-care professionals in LTC environments.
