Social Robots for Healthcare and Education in Latin America

Latin American countries face a demographic transition to an aging population. The region must take advantage of the demographic dividend created by a larger share of the working-age population before its population ages and the costs of social services experience a notable increase. The adoption of information technology in education can stimulate economic growth while doing so in healthcare can help contain costs and increase quality of life. While traditional robotics have been used for quite a while in schools and to assist medical procedures, such as surgeries, social robots, which emphasize social interaction with users as their main affordance, have recently been developed and increasingly adopted. Traditional robotics has focused on technical aspects such as mobility, control, and sensing.