The Caregiver Bot Show
Proposed slate. Nothing here has been filmed yet.
A show about the part nobody films.
Caregiving, healing, spirituality and robotics education, for anybody who is interested. You do not need a clinical background and you do not need to know what an exoskeleton is. If you have ever sat in a hospital corridor at an hour you do not want to remember, you are the audience.
This is not a product channel. Nine episodes are sketched below. If any of them turns into an advertisement, we have failed and you should tell us so.
What it is
Long conversations, plain language, and people who have actually done the work. Caregivers, nurses, therapists, chaplains, engineers, and the occasional person who just went home from hospital last Tuesday and has opinions about it.
Made in Sioux Falls. Free to watch, free to use, free to argue with.
What it covers
- Caregiving The day itself, not the brochure version of it.
- Healing What recovery actually looks like over months.
- Spirituality All traditions and none. No one is asked to agree.
- Robotics education How the machines work, in words that do not hide.
The proposed slate
Proposed, not yet filmed
Can a robot replace a caregiver?
The short answer is no, and we will say so in the first minute so nobody has to sit through an hour of suspense. The longer answer is the interesting one. Which parts of a caregiving day are machine work, and which parts are the reason the person gets out of bed at all.
Lifting a leg through the same range for the ninetieth time is machine work. Noticing that today is the anniversary of a death is not, and it never will be.
Proposed, not yet filmed
You cannot pour from an empty cup
Every caregiver has been told this. Almost none of them have been told how. An hour on rest that is actually restful, on asking for help before the crisis instead of during it, and on the very specific guilt of taking a Tuesday afternoon off while somebody you love is at home.
Bring your own cup. We will not be checking whether it is full.
Proposed, not yet filmed
What the body remembers
Motor learning without the jargon. Why a thousand rough repetitions of nearly the right reach can beat a hundred perfect ones. Why the brain relearns a task rather than a muscle. Why a kitchen is often a better classroom than a clinic gym, because the kettle is where the motivation lives.
A therapist sits in to correct us in real time, out loud, which is the part we are looking forward to least and you will enjoy most.
Proposed, not yet filmed
Praying in a hospital corridor
What people actually do at 3am in the family room with the vending machine. Praying, pacing, bargaining, rereading the same six words on a whiteboard, calling a sister who will not pick up.
We talk to people from several traditions and to people from none. Nobody is asked to agree with anybody, and nobody is asked to be comforted on schedule.
Proposed, not yet filmed
Forty pages, three of them useful
The discharge folder. What it says, what it leaves out, and how to find the three pages that matter before you reach the car park. We read a real folder aloud with every identifying detail removed, and translate it line by line into things a person can do on a Thursday.
Bring a highlighter. This is the most practical hour we will make.
Proposed, not yet filmed
The doorway is one inch too narrow
Why so much good assistive technology dies in the hallway. Turning radius, thresholds, the rug that eats a castor, the only outlet being on the wrong wall, the stair that was not mentioned on the form.
An entire episode about unglamorous measurements, because those measurements decide whether a device gets used every morning or stored in a garage behind the Christmas decorations.
Proposed, not yet filmed
Grief that arrives early
Anticipatory grief. Mourning somebody who is still sitting at the table, still asking what is for dinner. It is common, it is rarely named out loud, and naming it helps more than most people expect.
Gentle pacing on this one, and no tidy ending, because there is not one.
Proposed, not yet filmed
How a robot actually learns you
Under the hood, slowly, with nobody waving their hands. What gets measured, what gets stored, who can see it, how the system decides today was a harder day than yesterday, and what happens when it is simply wrong about you.
If you have ever wanted to ask an engineer where your data goes and watch them answer without a slide, this is the one.
Proposed, not yet filmed
Ask ROSE anything
Questions from whoever sends them, answered by the people who build the thing and the clinicians who use it. Nothing is off the table except the things we are genuinely not allowed to say yet, and when that is the reason we will say that is the reason.
ROSE is named after Michael's mother, an Air Force nurse who then gave 33 years to the VA. The bar for a straight answer in this house is high.
Send a question
Episode 09 is only as good as the questions.
Ask us anything about caregiving, recovery, faith in a hospital, or how any of this technology works. You do not have to use your full name, you do not have to explain why you are asking, and there is no such thing as a question that is too basic.
A person on this team reads every question that comes in. If we answer yours on the show, we will tell you before it goes out, and we will never put a detail on screen that you did not choose to give us.
If your question is about your own care or somebody else's, please also ask your own clinician. We can explain how things generally work. We cannot tell you what to do.
By email, write to partnerships@prosperousrobotics.com with the word Show in the subject line.
Questions we would love
- The thing you were too embarrassed to ask the discharge nurse.
- Something a device did that made no sense to you.
- What you wish somebody had told you in week one.
- Anything that begins with "is it normal that".
Want to be on it?
- Caregivers, nurses, therapists, chaplains and patients, all welcome.
- You can be off camera, voice only, if that is easier.
- Tell us roughly what you would want to talk about and we will call you.
Filming has not started. When there is a date, it will be announced here and on Today at Prosperous first.