Would you let the iPal robot look after your child?

Although parents try, it is impossible to spend every second of every day with their children.

With this in mind, the company, Avatar Mind has developed a robotic babysitter that takes on the responsibility of the adult, but interacts like a four to eight year old child.

So, machines make our coffee, clean up after us and act as our personal assistants, so they might as well raise our kids too, right?

iPal, the 3 foot robot , has a touch screen tablet on its chest, communicates using natural language and provide surveillance and video chat to ease the mind of absent parents.

Although iPal is apparently the future of parenting, it raises a few important questions about using robots to raise our children.

Robots are a great educational tool for our children and it definitely inspires them to learn about science and engineering, but there are significant dangers in having robots mind our children. Robots do not have the sensitivity or understanding needed for childcare.

However, the iPal could be a great idea for parents who get home from work late and just need someone to watch over their children for a short amount of time.

So, how will this friendship between your child and iPal blossom? Well, its autonomous learning engine helps to remember likes and interests and builds on them over time to improve conversation. It also monitors the cloud to increase its knowledge on subjects of interest to your child.

iPal also has sensors to feel touch, listen to speech and detect motion, plus it is equipped with an  emotional management system that senses and responds to happiness, depression and loneliness.

The robot is designed to take daily photos and videos that record your child’s growth, which can later be viewed by parents on their smartphone. Isn’t it great, you can view everything on your smartphone instead of actually making time to spend with your children!

As of now we do not know the long-term effects of young children to robot caregivers would be, but studies on monkeys have shown that severe social dysfunction occurs in infant animals that develop attachments only to inanimate surrogates.

Take a look at the iPal video here...

So, iPal - awful or not? Tell us what you think!

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