Japan turns to GPS tags and robots to manage dementia crisis

Last year, nearly 18,000 older people with dementia walked away from home in Japan. Almost 500 were never found alive. The numbers have doubled since 2012, and they're climbing as Japan's population ages faster than almost anywhere else on Earth.

One in three Japanese people is now 65 or older — second only to Monaco globally. The workforce that would traditionally provide care is shrinking. Immigration rules keep the number of foreign caregivers tightly capped. And the government's own projections are sobering: dementia-related care costs will nearly double to 14 trillion yen ($90 billion) by 2030.

So Japan is betting on technology to fill the gap.

Finding people, spotting early signs

Across the country, families are turning to GPS wearables that trigger alerts the moment someone leaves a safe zone. In some towns, convenience-store staff get real-time notifications when a person goes missing — creating an informal safety net that can locate them within hours instead of days.

Meanwhile, Fujitsu's aiGait system watches how people walk. It catches the early shuffling, the slower turns, the difficulty standing — the physical signatures of dementia before memory loss becomes obvious. A clinician can review the AI-generated skeletal outlines during a routine check-up, catching the disease earlier when interventions work better.

At Waseda University, researchers are building AIREC, a 150-kilogram humanoid robot designed to handle the tasks that eat up caregiver time: helping someone into socks, scrambling eggs, folding laundry. The team eventually wants AIREC to change diapers and prevent bedsores — the kind of constant, unglamorous work that burns out human caregivers. Similar robots are already in care homes, playing music to residents, guiding stretching exercises, and monitoring sleep from under mattresses at night.

Smaller devices fill emotional gaps. Poketomo, a 12-centimeter robot that fits in a pocket, reminds people to take medication, warns them about the weather, and offers conversation for those living alone. "We're focusing on social issues and using new technology to help solve those problems," said Miho Kagei, a development manager at Sharp.

The irreplaceable part

But here's what the robots can't do: they can't replace the reason Toshio Morita gets out of bed.

Morita works as a server at the Restaurant of Mistaken Orders in Tokyo, a café founded by Akiko Kanna after her father developed dementia. The restaurant hires people with cognitive decline. Morita uses flowers as memory anchors to remember orders. He's lost some of his sharpness, but he hasn't lost the satisfaction of conversation with strangers, the small dignity of earning pocket money, the simple fact of being useful.

"Everyone's different — that's what makes it fun," he says.

Tamon Miyake, the Waseda scientist leading the robot research, is clear about the limits of his own work: "Robots should supplement, not substitute, human caregivers." Technology can handle the physical tasks. It can spot early warning signs. It can locate someone who's wandered. But the thing that actually sustains people with dementia — engagement, purpose, the feeling that they still belong — that still requires another human being on the other side of the table.

Japan's crisis is real and urgent. The technological response is serious and spreading. But the cafés and community programs remind us that no algorithm has yet figured out how to replace what Morita found: a reason to show up.