As the U.S. faces a worsening shortage of care for the elderly, can robots fill the gap?

The oldest baby boomers in the U.S. are turning 80 this year and there aren’t enough home care aides for them. After outliving Booker T. Bones, their second service dog, Brenda and Brian Marquis still needed help with some of the more difficult parts of daily life.They found Robbie, a robot that rolls out of a hallway into their living room several times a day.“Do you want to exercise now? Please answer yes or no,” the caregiver robot asks 59-year-old Brian Marquis, who has been living with a traumatic brain injury since a 2012 car crash.“Yes,” he responds. Then he stands up as the robot’s googly-eyed digital screen “face” morphs into an exercise video that guides him through an afternoon workout.The decades-long quest to build home robots that are both helpful and lifelike — spurred on by fictional machines like The Jetsons’ humanoid maid Rosie — is still mostly a pipe dream. That’s despite growing appeal as the oldest baby boomers are turning 80 this year and the United States faces a deepening shortage of home care aides, driven by low wages, high turnover and demanding workloads.But the machine helping the Marquis family — a robot piloted by a University of New Hampshire laboratory, with funding from the National Institute of Aging — offers a glimpse of the emerging possibilities.