The robot pauses at the edge of the room as an engineer checks its sensors. Then, with a soft mechanical hum, this humanoid machine begins to move. It lifts a mannequin from a bed, slowly and carefully. The engineers hold their breath. I am in a robotics lab in Tokyo, Japan, as part of my Wellcome research fellowship. The engineers have repeated this test hundreds of times over several weeks, with mixed results. Japan has one of the world’s oldest populations, and a strained health and care workforce. It has also long been the global leader in the development and deployment of care robots….