A robot is helping an ailing couple stay in their home. Are more to come
for an aging population?
[June 01, 2026]
By MATT O'BRIEN
DURHAM, N.H. (AP) — 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.
‘Stretch’ aids a dementia patient with a range of tasks
The wheeled robot that some have likened to a coat rack was not what
Brenda Marquis initially had in mind when she wrote an email to a
robotics professor at nearby UNH, asking for advice on robotic dogs.
Robbie, the couple’s name for a new robot model officially called
Stretch 4, spends much of the day at a charging station between the
kitchen and bedroom. When it comes out, it does important work, like
nudging Brian, who has dementia, to eat lunch or drink water.
Brenda Marquis, 59, said she and her husband have physical, cognitive
and emotional disabilities that make life complex.
“We’ve been kind of trapped in a problem here in New Hampshire of being
able to find and recruit enough home care support,” Brenda Marquis said
in an interview at the couple’s Durham, New Hampshire apartment, where
she scoots around in a motorized wheelchair while taking care of her
husband. “That was when I started looking into robotics and trying to
figure out what to do.”
At the other end of Brenda's email was Momotaz Begum, a UNH computer
science professor who has spent years experimenting with “socially
assistive” robots that can aid people with Alzheimer's or other forms of
dementia. Her robotics lab is full of experimental robots, including the
four-legged variety.
Begum said the lab asked focus groups of older adults at memory care
units what kind of robot they would like as a home companion. Many
preferred pet-like robot designs.
“The common feedback that we got about Stretch was, ‘OK, this one looks
like a coat hanger,’" she said. "But what we learned over time is that
the look doesn’t matter.”
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A camera on the hand of a Hello Robot uses two lenses for improved
depth perception, during a demonstration at the University of New
Hampshire, Tuesday, April 21, 2026, in Durham, N.H. (AP Photo/Robert
F. Bukaty)
 Several makers are designing
robots for elder companionship
Apart from robotic vacuum cleaners, the closest thing many older
adults have to caregiving robots is a speaker powered by an
artificial intelligence voice assistant like Alexa. Some robot
makers have expanded that concept into swiveling tabletop machines
like ElliQ, designed for elder companionship.
But those aren't mobile or functional enough for Begum, who said she
is “trying to reduce that caregiver burden. And the caregiver
actually does way more than social companionship.”
Humanoids, meanwhile, are still far from being useful in most homes
and pose physical danger to people with limited mobility if the
robot trips and falls.
The founders of Hello Robot, maker of the Stretch robots, said its
simplicity is the point.
“Our robot’s very practical, pragmatic. I think it communicates
that,” said CEO Aaron Edsinger, a former director of robotics at
Google. "If you show up looking like a humanoid, that expectation’s
going to be set so high, it’s going to be very hard to do."
The typical version of the Stretch 4 includes a telescoping gripper
that can retrieve a water bottle and hold it out for a person to
drink through a straw. Show it a prescription bottle and it can help
read the fine print. The robot pulls together information from its
cameras and onboard sensors, together with other sensors installed
in a home, to figure out its location and who is in the room.
Manufactured at Hello Robot's headquarters in Martinez, California,
and sold for nearly $30,000, the new model that launched in May is
far from being as ubiquitous as a Roomba or an AI-powered speaker.
But for its target clientele, it can be a lifeline.
Robbie’s programmed care protocol for Brian is posted on the
couple’s wall, and it includes exercise instructions, meal and
medicine reminders, evening routine reminders and quick washup
prompts that are only triggered after Brian enters the bathroom.
“I was never into technology," Brian Marquis said. “Then I realized
I can’t remember to wash my face and my armpits. So, it just really
kind of set me free almost.”
Brenda Marquis said it also freed her from hours of daily work and
helped her reduce expenses. Fearful of leaving her husband at home
too long, she was ordering groceries on Instacart. Now she can leave
him with Robbie and go get groceries herself.
“I can go ahead and go to that mahjong game or whatever. Robbie’s
gonna take care of him,” she said.
——-
AP journalist Rodrique Ngowi contributed to this report.
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