Humanoid Companion Robot in an Inpatient Dementia Therapy Program

Getting inpatients with dementia to take part in therapy

Inpatient dementia care asks a great deal of people who are often frightened, disoriented or unwilling to leave the bed. Structured rehabilitation works best when it is repeated, personal and paced to the patient in front of you, and that is hard to sustain on a busy ward.

The team at this Singapore community hospital group faced a patient mix that speaks many languages, and a therapy schedule that depended on physiotherapists and nurses already stretched across other duties. Refusal and disengagement were a real obstacle to progress, not an occasional irritation.

Designing the robot around the ward

The hospital group worked with two outside vendors to develop the programme, and staff from rehabilitation, IT and research took part in designing and testing the deployment. The robot chosen was Dexie, a multilingual humanoid companion robot that can lead upper body exercises, facilitate cognitive games, hold conversations and run musical activities.

Dexie communicates in English, Mandarin, Malay and several Chinese dialects, which matters on a ward where language can decide whether a patient joins in at all. The programme was built into structured rehabilitation during patients' hospital stays rather than run as a novelty visit. The pilot began early in 2025, with sessions framed around therapeutic goals.

• Design and test the deployment with rehabilitation, IT and research staff before patients take part
• Match session content to therapeutic goals, including tailored exercise routines, sing-along activities and cognitive stimulation games
• Run sessions inside the structured rehabilitation plan during the patient's hospital stay
• Adjust prompts based on how patients respond, so skeptical patients are drawn in gradually

What the program reached and what staff saw

Twenty eight patients completed at least six robot led therapy sessions each. The completers were largely people living with dementia or cognitive impairment, with 79% of the 28 falling into that group.

The hospital group says the programme has already shown encouraging outcomes in both patient wellbeing and care efficiency. Those outcomes were described as encouraging without a figure attached, so they are presented here as direction, not as measured gains.

On the ward, a physiotherapist watched patients who had often refused therapy become fully cooperative, and a patient who barely spoke began encouraging peers during group activities. Skeptical patients warmed up to Dexie's prompts over time. These are staff observations, but they show the change the team was after.

What a US buyer can take from a program like this

Service Robot Co. is a full service, vendor neutral robot integrator for US businesses. We select the right robots across manufacturers, then handle robot leasing for business, robot deployment and integration, training, and service through a nationwide US engineer network. A hospital weighing a companion robot is still choosing among very different machines, and the job should drive that choice.

Public product descriptions show how far the roles differ. As of October 2026, Diligent Robotics' Moxi is described for tasks that do not involve patients, such as delivering lab samples, medication and supplies. Aethon's TUG is described as a robotic cart that moves medication, lab samples and surgical supplies, and SoftBank's Pepper is described as guiding patients and offering emotional support. A site assessment is how a buyer matches the robot to the floor and the workflow.

We offer robot leasing on a lease term of three years, with one fixed payment quoted after a site assessment. Go live support and one partner, one number service keep the deployment moving once the robot arrives.