A what? Don’t worry I know it sounds like some exotic
A what? Don’t worry, I know it sounds like some exotic species David Attenborough and an eight-man camera crew have been filming for three years in the Australian rainforest but it is in fact a robot especially designed to look after old people. It’s Japanese of course – most robots are – but since the Japanese, especially the women (they live to an average age of 85), live longer than any other race, it’s very much in their interest to solve the geriatric problem sooner rather than later.The Wakamaru is 3ft 3in tall, has mini cameras in its eyebrows, a vocabulary of 10,000 words and has been programmed to hold a reasonably intelligent conversation in either a male or female voice, reminding its patient, for instance, to take medication, tune into EastEnders, have a meal or go to sleep. If, let us say the Wakamaru trundled up to its owner and said: “How are you?” and there was no answer, it would immediately telephone the patient’s next of kin whereupon pictures from its cunningly-placed eyebrow cameras would come up on the screen showing the worried relative exactly what was going on.At night the Wakamaru is programmed to patrol the premises like a security guard and by day, when it’s not chatting amiably about the shocking price of sushi, it can even do a little light housework. Now that’s what I call a breakthrough and for £5,000 it has to be a snip.My bad-tempered, virtually bed-ridden great aunt who lives on her own in Bristol pays a carer £50 a week to come in every day for 15 minutes just to check she’s still breathing and take out the rubbish Now she’d be a perfect candidate for a Wakamaru. Besides paying for it in two years, it could deal with her temper better than any of her friends or relatives who’ve stopped visiting because she’s so difficult.As long as it was programmed not to react violently if it were shouted at or told for the umpteenth time that the country would be better off under Mrs Thatcher, my battle-axe of a great aunt would be laughing More importantly, so would we.. “I have the same brown eyes as my grandmother but they have not seen what she has seen.” Granddaughter of Holocaust survivor.
Judith Hassan has spent 25 years doing some of the bravest work in the world Last night she celebrated the fact with a party in London. She was launching a book based on her life’s work in what she herself calls “a house next door to trauma”. Gathered together were survivors and the children and grandchildren of survivors.There was an eternity of living history in that room I said as much to one of the guests “History,” she replied. “Yes, too much history.” The survivors were very elderly people. The majority sat around a small table in the middle of the room Although welcomed and loved they were definitely distinct Unlike the rest of us they had been to hell They were a frail little group.
Their accents were those of a place which vanished in the middle of the last century.Months ago I was given a glimpse of that world. I was visiting Judith Hassan at the Holocaust Survivors’ Centre in London. We talked about the differences and similarities between the experiences of the Holocaust and the Rwandan genocide I was introduced to some of the survivors. Among them was Roman Halter, who as a boy was sent to Auschwitz.
