Comparing the Development and Commercialization of Care Robots in the European Union and Japan

Abstract

Faced with ageing populations, escalating care needs, and growing shortages of care workers, Japanese and European Union governments have pursued large, publicly funded research projects to develop and commercialize care robots. Yet despite being the two world leaders in this field, having both spent hundreds of millions of euros (tens of billions of yen) on its development, Japan and the EU have rarely been compared directly and substantively in social studies of care robotics. How similar are their approaches to care robot development and commercialization, and what do the differences tell us about contrasting priorities in science, technology and innovation policy as well as tensions between treating care robotics as an industry and as a research domain? The first two sections of this paper chart Japanese and EU approaches to the development and implementation of care robots since the late 1990s. The final sections identify and analyse their key similarities and differences.