Paro is a $5,000 therapy seal that’s said to have therapeutic effects on elderly individuals with dementia. The Front Porch Center, a California organization that runs retirement communities. It deployed Paro in seven homes, and studied the effects over the course of six months.
Unsurprisingly, the results were positive: Paro increased “social behaviour” in 97 percent of cases, and reduced wandering and anxiety by 73 and 59 percent respectively. The study isn’t perfect—it’s lacking a control group of dead, non-robotic seals, for example—but the 920 individual observations are hard to argue with.
via Gizmodo
