{"id":634988,"date":"2026-04-27T22:56:24","date_gmt":"2026-04-27T22:56:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/634988\/"},"modified":"2026-04-27T22:56:24","modified_gmt":"2026-04-27T22:56:24","slug":"meet-the-melbourne-built-robot-now-in-dozens-of-aged-care-homes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/634988\/","title":{"rendered":"Meet the Melbourne-built robot now in dozens of aged care homes"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"David<\/p>\n

April 27, 2026 \u2014 5:00am<\/p>\n

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In a Mecwacare residential home in Ballarat, staff work alongside a four-foot robot that is brightly coloured, speaks up to 90 languages, occasionally blows bubbles and remembers details such as the songs residents grew up with.<\/p>\n

Grace Brown built the first of these machines, called Abi, in her bedroom during a Melbourne lockdown because she felt lonely.<\/p>\n

Five years on, the 26-year-old mechatronics engineer is chief executive of Andromeda Robotics, a Melbourne-headquartered company valued at roughly $100 million with offices in San Francisco, and convinced that the robot she started as a hobby will become something far larger than aged care.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe hardest part is not what people expect,\u201d Brown says. \u201cIt\u2019s not the engineering. It\u2019s not the fundraising. It\u2019s the fact that we are effectively writing the rule book for how a robot should behave around someone who is lonely, grieving, confused, or dying \u2013 in real time, in real homes, with real families watching. There is no textbook for that.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"AndromedaAndromeda co-founder Grace Brown.Jessica Hromas<\/p>\n

This month, Andromeda deployed its 22nd Abi across Victorian not-for-profit provider Mecwacare, completing what the company calls the largest rollout of empathetic humanoid companion robots in Australian aged care. More than 1500 residents are now sharing their days with one. An undisclosed first US customer, on the West Coast, goes live shortly.<\/p>\n

Australia faces a projected shortfall of at least 110,000 aged-care workers by 2030, according to the Committee for Economic Development of Australia. In Brown\u2019s own research, 40 per cent of Australian residents do not get a single visitor in a given month; in the US, it\u2019s 60 per cent.<\/p>\n

\u201cLoneliness at the end of life isn\u2019t the absence of people,\u201d she says. \u201cMost residents are surrounded by people. It\u2019s the absence of someone who knows you. Who remembers the name of your first dog. Who notices you\u2019ve gone quiet today in a way you weren\u2019t yesterday.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"Andromeda\u2019sAndromeda\u2019s Abi with residents in a Mecwacare facility.<\/p>\n

Andromeda is not alone in the market. Israel\u2019s Intuition Robotics makes ElliQ, a lamp-like tabletop companion that last month became the first social AI robot fully reimbursed by a US Medicaid program, in Washington state. Japan\u2019s Paro therapeutic seal has been deployed in care homes globally for two decades. Groove X\u2019s Lovot offers a furry, pet-like alternative, and South Korea\u2019s ChatGPT-powered Hyodol dolls are in more than 12,000 homes.<\/p>\n

Related Article\"Canva<\/a><\/p>\n

Andromeda\u2019s bet is that a full-sized humanoid designed explicitly for empathy, closer in spirit to Pixar\u2019s fictional healthcare robot Baymax than a lamp, is the form factor that wins.<\/p>\n

Its $23 million Series A funding round last September<\/a>, led by San Francisco\u2019s Forerunner Ventures with CSIRO-linked Main Sequence, Rethink Impact and Perth-based Purpose Ventures, funded Brown\u2019s move to the US and Andromeda\u2019s American launch. The company has not disclosed its current valuation.<\/p>\n

Mecwacare says the early evidence is positive: the company\u2019s research found 74 per cent of staff reported observing reduced resident agitation when Abi was present, with the robot rated nine out of 10 for overall satisfaction. Mecwacare chief executive Anne McCormack says staff now call Abi their \u201chappiness assistant\u201d.<\/p>\n

That is not the same as a clinical trial, however. A 2024 Nature feature flagged a thin evidence base, risks of infantilisation for dementia residents, and the possibility such technology ends up affordable only to the best-resourced homes.<\/p>\n

Brown acknowledges all of it. \u201cThe pushback usually comes before Abi arrives. Not after,\u201d she says. \u201cThe people most sceptical in theory are frequently the ones who, within a week of deployment, are asking when Abi can sing a specific song their mother used to know.\u201d<\/p>\n

There\u2019s also the not insignificant question of harm. Andromeda has had what she calls \u201cminor incidents\u201d, interactions in which something Abi said did not land well. None, she says, has injured a resident, and every home has a named support lead who can pause the robot at any moment. \u201cWe run post-incident reviews the same way a hospital does after a clinical event.\u201d<\/p>\n

The more pressing issue for Brown, and for Andromeda, is regulatory silence. Abi is not a medical device, not a toy, and not a member of staff, so it currently sits in a grey area.<\/p>\n

\"Andromeda\u2019sAndromeda\u2019s Abi with residents in a Mecwacare facility.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe defaults being set right now will shape how billions of people eventually experience these machines,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n

Aged care, she argues, is just the first step in a much larger goal. She\u2019s confident that billions of robots are about to enter human environments, and almost none are being built to read a room. Andromeda wants to be the \u201csocial operating system\u201d every one of those machines eventually needs.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf the social OS works here, it works anywhere,\u201d she says. \u201cThe scale of what we\u2019re building is a $100 billion company at minimum.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Business Briefing newsletter delivers major stories, exclusive coverage and expert opinion. Sign up to get it every weekday morning<\/a>.<\/p>\n

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\"DavidDavid Swan<\/a> is the technology editor for The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald. He was previously technology editor for The Australian newspaper.Connect via X<\/a> or email<\/a>.From our partners<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"April 27, 2026 \u2014 5:00am Save You have reached your maximum number of saved items. Remove items from…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":634989,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[34],"tags":[64,63,137,500],"class_list":["post-634988","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-healthcare","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-health","tag-healthcare"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/634988","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=634988"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/634988\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/634989"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=634988"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=634988"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=634988"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}