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I think Honda and Toyota are designing these devices for their growing elderly population in Japan.



While Honda, Toyota, and many companies in the Japanese robotics space do devote quite a lot of resources to thinking about the elderly population, a significant amount of the R&D work done is not done with the intent of being immediately productizable, but rather to do basic R&D and to fly the company flag. (See Asimo or, indeed, any robot which looks remotely like a human. Or the gigantic eight-legged spider robot who existed to wave a large fan at people that my tech incubator made, which existed to say "Look at us, we're capable of making a gigantic semi-autonomous eight legged robot with one functional limb which you could mount all sorts of things that are not cooling devices on.")


It looks like it may be difficult to mount & balance yourself on this if your mobility is limited.

See the few seconds starting at 1:13 in the video.


Does it look like a device convenient to use for an elder or someone disabled?


Many elderly suffer from amyotrophia, I doubt this being usefull device, except for people which are disabled.




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