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Last October, iRobot Corp. announced the formation of a new research and development division to pursue opportunities in home healthcare robots for seniors – but the company offered scant details about the operation, which is being headed by Authoria Inc. founder and former CEO Tod Loofbourrow.
Last weekend, at the Nantucket Conference, iRobot CEO and co-founder Colin Angle sat down with MHT reporter Galen Moore for an exclusive look at iRobot’s plans in the senior home healthcare arena.
MHT: What’s the opportunity you’re looking at in in-home healthcare for seniors?
Colin Angle: We are facing a demographic shift. If you think about where we are today, really in rough terms, there is four potential caregivers for every one person over the age of 65 who may or may not need care. The next 20 years goes from 4 people able to give care, to 1. So every one of us is able bodied will have someone that potentially is in need of care, and it’s going to create a crisis that will overwhelm our assisted living facilities. It’s going to change our society – unless we can deliver technology-based products to our aging population so that they can remain independent longer.
Ultimately it’s about helping people perform physical tasks that they can’t do any more. Anything from robots vacuuming your floor, which we know how to do, to helping someone out of their bed, helping them get dressed in the morning and get to the bathroom. So you can sort of see all the different activities of daily living that we need to figure out how to automate. And then scale it over time.
MHT: What comes first?
CA: So the types of early applications are things like making care and understanding what’s going on in the home more proactive. I call my mom every night just to make sure she’s OK. Well, what happens when she doesn’t answer? Could you call the neighbor down the hall? Maybe they don’t answer. You go call the police. They go and knock on the door. If she doesn’t answer the door, they break the door down. She’s probably across the hall playing bridge, but in my mind she’s fallen down the stairs and has broken her hip and is in a horrible state. Well, why not create a robot buddy in the home that you can call and activate, and it can drive around the home and make sure that she’s not fallen down the stairs. Because the alternative to that would be instrumenting the home with cameras, but then you have real privacy issues that, you know, big brother is watching.
Instead of having 10 sensors and a big brotherly surveillance, you put one sensor on a mobile platform, pay for the mobility and navigation, and get the same effect – but on a more on-demand, more social interaction model type of basis and then, if you want to, add video instead of just a heat sensor. If you want to, add delivery of information. If you want to let people visit each other using these robots, it gets more and more possible.
MHT: You have experience selling to consumers, the government and industry. In your mind, where’s the market for these devices you’re developing?
CA: Our focus is going to be on the consumers. I think that we’ll be able to leverage interest on the government side in our ability to go respond to NIH funding and government funding opportunities to develop the technology, but then also use our consumer channel expertise and low-cost manufacturing techniques to take our inventions and reduce them to a cost-effective, affordable state and get them into the marketplace via retail and our online systems. It’s a great synergy.
MHT: Do you see opportunities emerging from the U.S. health care reform legislation?
CA: One of the big things coming out of healthcare reform is a thing called the Community Living Assistance Services and Supports Act (CLASS) which is a mechanism to reimburse people staying at home for technology and services that allow them to stay at home. So, this is huge. It doesn’t start paying out for a number of years, but people start paying in now. And this is going to create a massive economic opportunity for companies that can really understand cost-effective ways of helping people stay independent and delivering those services to those people. The government’s going to help support that.
MHT: Outside of your new senior care division, what’s next for iRobot?
CA: I think that there’s a tremendous amount of opportunity just in the home. You look at the amount of maintenance required in order to keep your home the way you want it, whether it be from food preparation and putting things away, scrubbing windows to mowing lawns. We’re not done there by any stretch of the imagination.
I think that another area where we would see increasing amounts of robots is in the energy arena. Right now they are facing this (oil spill) crisis down in the Gulf of Mexico. They’re having problems shutting off the oil at the sea floor. Better robots could have shut this thing off at the source.
MHT: Will robots be able to harvest new forms of energy?
CA: I think if you want to look far in the future, you look into space, and the notion of mining asteroids and really doing some wild stuff. Who knows? It’s possible within our lifetime – not possible within the next 20 years – but I think that robots will play a role. Underwater exploration would be another great area where there’s so much resource that could be harvested but no cost-effective way of getting there and doing that and exploring those channels.
MHT: What about Colin Angle himself? Your co-founders have left iRobot to found new robotics ventures. Are you itching to move on to something new as well?
CA: I’m having a great time. My dream was always to build a company that can really change the world, and there’s lots of ways of doing it and one of them is building a company at scale. We’re increasingly making the business more profitable, and it’s fun for me. I get to play with the technology and work out how robots are going to affect the world on a larger scale. For me, that’s what gets me up in the morning, and that’s what keeps me motivated.
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