Another week, another healthcare robot coming put of Japan (and this is generally a good thing). This new model, named Taizou [JP], is developed by the country’s National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST) and was unveiled today. Its purpose is to motivate the elderly to exercise more in order to prevent diseases and stay young mentally.

The 70cm-tall robot (weight: 7kg) may look like an ordinary stuffed toy, but Taizou is actually pretty sophisticated. He has a total of 20 joints in his body, each with 26 degrees of freedom. His servo motors enable him to perform around 30 different exercises (while standing or sitting on a chair). Taizou is also able to speak a few sentences and can understand if a human instructor talks to him through built-in speech recognition software.

Taizou is already being tested in a health facility in Japan. The makers plan to offer short-term rentals for the robot from April next year. They also aim at lowering Taizou’s price, which stands at $8,000 at the moment.

Watch him make his moves in the video embedded below:
http://blip.tv/play/grExgZ%2BlDgI

Via Robot Watch [JP]