Robot Stretch – As U.S. families struggle to find home care aides amid low wages, high turnover, and heavy workloads, a University of New Hampshire–funded robot called Stretch 4 is helping one couple manage daily care for a partner with dementia and a traumatic brain injury.
When Robbie rolls out of a hallway into the Marquis family’s living room, Brian Marquis knows the script is simple: exercise now.
The robot’s googly-eyed digital screen face asks 59-year-old Brian Marquis—who has been living with a traumatic brain injury since a 2012 car crash—“Do you want to exercise now?. Please answer yes or no.” He answers “Yes. ” and the screen shifts into an exercise video that guides him through an afternoon workout.
For Brenda Marquis, the routine is not just about convenience. It is about surviving a shortage that has left their household in a constant scramble for help. “We’ve been kind of trapped in a problem here in New Hampshire of being able to find and recruit enough home care support. ” Brenda Marquis said in an interview at the couple’s Durham. New Hampshire apartment. where she navigates daily life in a motorized wheelchair while caring for her husband.
The shortage is being driven by low wages, high turnover, and demanding workloads, and it is arriving at a moment when older Americans are putting new pressure on caregiving systems. The oldest baby boomers are turning 80 this year, and the need for home care aides is deepening.
The robot helping the Marquis family is called Stretch 4—an officially named model—and it is piloted by a University of New Hampshire laboratory with funding from the National Institute of Aging. Its presence is a reminder that the gap is already here, not waiting for the future.
Brenda originally thought she was asking for help with robotic pets. She wrote an email to a robotics professor at nearby UNH, asking for advice on robotic dogs. But the outcome became Robbie, the couple’s name for a wheeled robot model officially called Stretch 4.
Robbie spends much of the day at a charging station between the kitchen and bedroom. When it comes out, it performs tasks that matter to safety and basic independence—nudging Brian, who has dementia, to eat lunch or drink water.
Brenda said she and her husband have physical, cognitive and emotional disabilities that make life complex. In that environment, the decision wasn’t about chasing novelty. It was about searching for workable support. “That was when I started looking into robotics and trying to figure out what to do,” she said.
At the other end of her email was Momotaz Begum, a UNH computer science professor who has spent years experimenting with “socially assistive” robots that can aid people with Alzheimer’s or other forms of dementia.
Begum said the lab asked focus groups of older adults at memory care units what kind of robot they would like as a home companion. Many preferred pet-like robot designs. She described feedback that shaped how they tested Stretch. “The common feedback that we got about Stretch was, ‘OK, this one looks like a coat hanger,’” Begum said. “But what we learned over time is that the look doesn’t matter.”.
That lesson lands with weight in the real world, where caregiving is not a design contest—it is a daily workload.
Robot makers have tried other approaches. Apart from robotic vacuum cleaners. some older adults’ closest experience with caregiving robots is a speaker powered by an artificial intelligence voice assistant like Alexa. Others have built on that idea with swiveling tabletop machines like ElliQ, designed for elder companionship. Begum said those machines are not mobile or functional enough for what she is trying to achieve. She said she is “trying to reduce that caregiver burden. And the caregiver actually does way more than social companionship.”.
Humanoids, for their part, are still far from being useful in most homes. Begum said humanoids also pose physical danger to people with limited mobility if the robot trips and falls.
Hello Robot, the company behind the Stretch robots, has staked its approach on simplicity. The founders say that practicality is the point.
“Our robot’s very practical, pragmatic. I think it communicates that,” said CEO Aaron Edsinger, a former director of robotics at Google. “If you show up looking like a humanoid, that expectation’s going to be set so high, it’s going to be very hard to do.”
Stretch 4 is built for tasks that caregivers often do—retrieving items, prompting routines, and handling information with sensors. The typical version of the Stretch 4 includes a telescoping gripper that can retrieve a water bottle and hold it out for a person to drink through a straw. It can also take a prescription bottle and help read the fine print.
The robot pulls together information from its cameras and onboard sensors, along with other sensors installed in a home, to figure out its location and who is in the room.
Manufactured at Hello Robot’s headquarters in Martinez, California, the new model launched in May and is sold for nearly $30,000. It is far from being as ubiquitous as a Roomba or an AI-powered speaker. But for its target clientele, it can be a lifeline.
For Brian, the care protocol is detailed and visible. Robbie’s programmed care protocol is posted on the couple’s wall. It includes exercise instructions, meal and medicine reminders, evening routine reminders, and quick washup prompts that are only triggered after Brian enters the bathroom.
“I was never into technology,” Brian Marquis said. “Then I realized I can’t remember to wash my face and my armpits. So, it just really kind of set me free almost.”
Brenda’s view is shaped by the economics of caregiving as much as the daily schedule. She said it freed her from hours of daily work and helped her reduce expenses. Fearful of leaving her husband at home too long, she had been ordering groceries on Instacart. Now she can leave him with Robbie and go get groceries herself.
“I can go ahead and go to that mahjong game or whatever. Robbie’s gonna take care of him,” Brenda Marquis said.
The sequence is built around a hard reality: when home care help is scarce, families look for anything that can reliably cover the next moment—whether it’s an afternoon workout, a sip of water, or a prompt to wash up before the day moves on.
And in the Marquis apartment, the robot doesn’t arrive as a futuristic replacement. It arrives as coverage, right where the gap is widest.
robotics elderly care home care aides Stretch 4 Hello Robot University of New Hampshire National Institute on Aging dementia traumatic brain injury aging population home robotics
So basically a robot is doing the stretching now? wild.
I don’t get it, like is this replacing caregivers or just helping? Cuz if it’s “helping” then where’s the actual staff still. Low wages is the real issue, not the robot face.
My cousin had dementia and they said robots can confuse the person. But maybe this one just asks yes or no so it’s fine? Also why is this University of New Hampshire thing not getting full funding, like if it works shouldn’t it be everywhere already?
Home care is impossible here too, like you call and nobody answers, then they act like you’re bothering them. I’m glad the Stretch 4 helps with workouts but I swear I saw an ad once that said robots can “monitor” like healthcare robots are the same as a nurse… so is it actually doing anything medical or just videos? Kinda feels like they’re trying to solve a staffing problem with tech, which is sad but I guess better than nothing.