Can robots help us care for an aging population?

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Today, on the program, the story of an aging workforce told in three parts

from American Public Media.

This is Marketplace.

In London, England today, I'm Kai Risdahl.

It is Wednesday, 16 July.

Good as always to have you along with us, everybody along for more from our series, The Age of Work.

What the demographic changes happening in the United States and across the rest of the planet are going to mean for our economic future.

All right.

Meet the makers, Crafty Fox Market, established 2010.

Let's see what we have here.

Part one of our story, The Personal, has me, Neila Richardson.

She's ADP's chief economist and our partner on this project.

We're at King's Cross, central London-ish, if you're unfamiliar, walking by an outdoor exercise class and a water park full of kids into a pop-up market inside what looks to be a rehabbed warehouse.

High ceilings, brick walls, dozens of tables with with vendors selling jewelry and art and pottery, also body butters.

My name's Stephen Newo.

I'm the founder of Datsit Skincare Limited.

Tell me about your company, Datsit.

Yeah, so that's it skincare.

So basically what I did is I started this company when I was 50, as I turned 50.

Wait, how old are you now?

54 now.

So this is my fourth year of trading.

Basically what happened is I've been making this skincare for my family for about eight or nine years.

One of my children had

skincare conditions.

So I started off looking at YouTube recipes and all that sorts of stuff.

Just doing it in your kitchen, right?

Just in my kitchen, trying different things, trying it on the kids.

Kids will tell you straight, you can't make me do that, that is too greasy, I don't want that, don't put that on me.

You can't make me.

It's your market research right there, eh?

Do your daughters know you say this when you're talking in the press?

Sometimes I find that they're 17 now, the twins, and they come and help me on the stalls and stuff.

And so one of the people, when I tell them my story, I say, this is one of them here.

And then they're like, oh, really your skin looks amazing yeah so we do all that and then lockdown so I'm a graphic the pandemic right pandemic so I'm a graphic designer by trade so I've been a graphic designer for over 30 years right

but I've been freelance for the last 15 or so and literally overnight they said no freelancers from Monday it was a Friday

everything income stopped everything stopped so I was like wow what are we gonna do here and I don't ever want to be in that position where something else outside outside impacts my whole impact for my family, you know?

So the kids, it's actually the kids that said, why don't you sell your skincare there?

All right, but wait.

So you were a freelance graphic designer,

right?

Still are when you can get a gig.

Yeah.

Freelance is one thing, right?

You're running your own business, kind of, right?

How do you turn, how do you learn how to be an entrepreneur, right?

Did you go someplace and say, go to entrepreneurship?

So what it was, right, I've always considered myself a worker.

But when it comes to doing my own thing, in a space I'm not comfortable in at 50, right?

At 50, right?

This is my last role, right?

This is my last role as well.

As far as I'm concerned, I was like, right, after I googled what was happening, what people were doing, took me six months to get myself in order.

Launched in January 2022 with the mindset, like, well, people kind of know me in the entertainment world, they kind of know me in the graphic design world.

I'm big Steve, I could do this.

Big Steve.

I could do this.

We should say you are actually big.

I could do this.

A week later,

after the whole fanfare of me online.

Ooh,

okay, sales are not coming through anymore.

Like, okay.

So how do I do that?

Right.

Was it harder than a graphic design campaign?

Now I'm doing seven days a week.

Right.

But now my mindset is like, but I'm doing it for my business, right?

So I was at a market like this, chatting to my neighbors, and then somebody came along and loved my product.

He said, oh, Shia, fantastic.

So when did you start this business?

And I told her what I did.

She said, have you heard of startup for seniors?

I said, who are you talking to?

She goes, but did you know that a lot of businesses, new entrepreneurs, are what we call senior preneurs that start

on another, from 50 onwards?

I said, what are you trying to say?

I was getting a bit like offended, like, what are you trying to say?

What are you trying to say?

Where's the seniors?

What are you talking about?

There's no OMPs over here.

What are you talking about?

So then she was like, no, no, have a look at this.

So I thought, let me go see what they're on about.

So it's like a six-weeks X course.

And it was the most amazing thing to start me off because they introduced me to to business planning like the one-page business plan and it transformed my business in the next six months.

So how is business now?

So business is excellent in the terms of reach.

I've got nearly 3,000 customers, regular customers coming back.

We've got this whole cost of living crisis at the same time.

We've got a lot of things happening.

So like revenue is a bit down this year from last year at the moment.

However,

I'm ready, I'm at that point where it's ready to scale.

I'm looking for funding now.

Well, that's what I was going to ask.

You've bootstrapped this whole thing, right?

This whole thing so far is out of here.

Yeah, yeah.

And any freelance work, max

goes into this.

Max overdraft.

I've gone for the whole thing.

Yeah.

So

there's some risk there.

You've taken on some personal risk.

Up until this point, I've always been risk averse.

This time, I've tacked everything in it.

Last roll of the dice, man.

Come on.

Because you believe.

Yeah, yeah, I do.

Would you have had the guts, the drive, the persistence at 35 had you had this business idea that you do now?

Great question.

That's a good question you know

see my problem was I do a lot of things so I was doing music I did music when I was younger I do acting I've done it been in movies this thing

I think if I'd started it when I was 35 and said I'm not gonna do any of that acting stuff not gonna do any of that stuff I'm gonna focus on the business I think I would have been I would have been quite a major but Things come when they're supposed to come.

So now you're going out looking for funding?

Yeah.

How's that going?

So I didn't know anything about that either.

So

I went to this business conference in year two, right?

It was like startups and stuff like that.

And

I went there and they were all talking about strategies and exit plans and all this kind of like what are you talking about?

What language is this?

I don't know any of the terminology, but I thought if I was in that environment, some of it would rub off.

An hour and a half in, I was ready to leave.

And then I met somebody who said to me, have you spoken to that charity over there?

It's a charity.

Do you think I need charity?

And they said, yeah, it's called Digital Boost.

They give free mentoring and business guidance so what they do they use people in the industry whether it's in banking up marketing whatever it is in the industry they offer their time for free and you have a one-to-one as many times as you like about neila's question as to whether this would have worked at 35 would you have been able to ask for help at 35

big big steve at 35 come on man i was a little bit i was a little bit arrogant,

a little bit out there.

I wouldn't have asked nobody for anything.

One question.

Do you think that the UK government is aware of people like you,

people in their 50s ready to start a business having the passion?

Let's be real.

I'll be real with you, yeah.

We are what they might consider micro-businesses, right?

And I'll be even more honest with you.

95% as what I say are women that do this stuff creatively.

They've got some brilliant ideas.

They're doing a lot of stuff, but they're not earning enough to do it full-time.

Things are slowly changing.

There's also a few more grants that have been happening locally to help female founders.

But then the next step is the biggest one.

That getting that 150k to really take you up, let you go out there and put yourself in stores.

I mean, you get an order for 5,000 from Whole Foods.

What are you going to do?

You're going to be whipping that up in your kitchen?

You can't be doing that.

Is that next jump?

There's no support.

They don't ask us what we need.

And what could they do?

What specifically could the UK government do?

You know, a lot of the government things that always come, oh, we need money, we need money.

But I'll be honest with you, I can't scale without the funds.

I can't.

I've met so many of these traders again mostly women that have given up on their dreams given up because financially they just can't handle it anymore and imagine that in your 50s and you're juggling like you were in your 20s i'm actually earning less now than i was in my 20s but it's to build something you're happier it's to build something

i can juggle i can do my little thing but it's to build something i can see something at the end of the line you know i mean

and it's that hope it's the hope that keeps people doing it people as we say on this program all the time, are the economy.

Companies matter too, though.

That's next.

Part two of our story, the corporate, comes from a woman who changed culture and policy inside her company so she could keep working as she got older.

I'm Suzanne.

Hello, Kai.

Hi, Kai.

I'm good.

Thank you.

Hi, I'm Nila.

Great to meet you.

Suzanne Morgan is 57 years old.

She's a long-haul pilot at British Airways.

And when Nila and I met her out at Heathrow the other day, she was fresh off a flight from Hyderabad, India.

It was good.

It was good.

Long, but yeah, it's fine.

It was good.

Nice day for flying, so beautiful.

We chatted for a bit as security checked us in.

Turns out she works in pilot recruiting too.

And as we stood there, a younger, one-assumed pilot in training approached a little bit starstruck.

I'm so sorry to interrupt.

I just wanted to say hello because you're looking my hero.

Oh,

how are you?

Sorry.

Hi, nice to meet you.

She told Suzanne she's hoping to fly with her one day.

Suzanne said to reach out if she ever needs anything, about which, more in a second.

What made you want to start flying and start flying commercial airlines?

So I started flying when I I was four on my dad's knee in a glider.

And I was surrounded by aviation, really.

My mother was a journalist, she edited a gliding magazine.

My brother, he flew as well, he was older than me.

But when I was sort of growing up on the airfield, I just didn't see any women pilots, not any commercial at all.

In fact, we didn't really in the UK get commercial pilots until about the late 80s.

So it was only when I went to university.

I joined something called an air squadron, which is run by our Royal Air Force, and they taught me how to fly for free.

And then I fly to the Air Force and got in.

But unfortunately, in the 90s, they weren't taking women for combat roles.

It was only transport only.

And as much as I wanted to do that, I then got offered this sponsorship with British Midland, decided to go commercial.

At that first commercial job that Suzanne mentioned, she was one of only three women pilots at a company that had no maternity policy.

She worked to get those policies put into place.

And now, decades later and decades older, there's something else.

Menopause.

It's a reality that faces half of the working population.

And to keep women in their jobs as they age, which countries like the UK and the United States are going to have to do as fewer young people enter the workforce, companies are going to have to be ready.

The government here published a survey a couple of years ago.

One in four women of menopausal age had considered leaving their jobs because of their symptoms.

For me, I was coming up to menopausal age really, and I just didn't know what was ahead of me.

I had heard about hot flushes, I'd heard about things that might impact my career, and I was just really quite concerned.

So, I couldn't find out any information at all.

We have medicals every year, and I went to my medical examiner and asked them,

but there's no data for women because we're the first sort of cohort to come up to that sort of older age.

So, I then asked my older colleagues, and we decided it was a good idea to share some information.

I set up this WhatsApp group.

I've now got a third of the women pilots in British Airways in this group now.

And from there, it spiraled into reaching out to our head of well-being.

And my group was a bit unique in that we had some challenges with the CAA, which is our civil aviation authority, a bit like your FAA.

Whereas every time we took some HRT, they would ground you.

Reach out to your hormone replacement.

Yeah, exactly that.

So if you took estrogen or progesterone, you were grounded for two weeks.

Then if in a few months you're up the dose, you're grounded again for two weeks.

And just the process of that is it's difficult to ring up the the company and say, I need two weeks off because of, you know, it's not a nice thing to have to do.

So eventually we lobbied and we got that changed because it is a natural hormone.

It's no different to, you know, anything else really.

So again, there was just no data on women's health in the CAA.

What other changes have you been able to get BA to make, right?

Because not to put too fine a point on it, you're changing a company's sort of attitude and culture.

Yeah, so I think when we asked for support, one of the other big things we had as well we were having issues with our local doctors so in the UK we have a general practitioner and if you're feeling ill or you need help you go to them and a lot of them aren't menopause trained so they don't understand.

It was very difficult to sometimes get the right HRT so we went to British Airways and asked look can we get some consultants and specialist doctors appointments which they gave out to the pilots because if we're not flying it's a cost.

So that was one of the big things that for us And then recently they've introduced a menopause shirt because I'm dressed now in a shirt and tie, look a bit like a man in my uniform.

It's a standard uniform, right?

Yeah.

Exactly.

So now we've lobbied to have an open neck shirt.

And they've listened, they've designed it, and we're going to start trialling it in a few weeks.

Since you are involved in recruiting,

you recruit young women.

Do you recruit mid-career women as well?

No, we do.

Exactly that.

No, we do.

What's nice about our Spearbird Pilot Academy is that it's open from the age of 18 up to 55.

So we're just changing the whole sort of dynamic really of our sort of workforce of these new people coming in.

It's lovely to see people having a second career and maybe particularly women having had their children thinking actually now it's my time, it's time for me.

And they, you know, they do really well with us because they've got life experience as well.

I'm trying to ask this in a delicate way.

How much longer are you going to do this and what do you think your legacy is going to be?

Because there's a zillion pilots out there, you know, but you have people walking up to you in the hallway saying you're my hero.

I love my job.

I love flying still.

That's the ultimate thing.

I still love taking an airplane up and flying.

I do a little flying in light aircraft as well.

So I do have a passion still for flying.

And I would do it as long as I still enjoy the job.

I'm healthy and there's no reason why I can't go on to 65.

But I think the thing that we're trying to do do is just

you know I work in a man's well but I'm not a man and it just we just need a bit of support through this transient time so we can fulfill our careers really and we can choose when we want to retire.

It occurs to me you're bookending this experience.

You started with maternity leave.

You're ending with menopause at getting that through all the way through to retirement age and I know as a woman, just seeing policies in place, whether you're going to have a baby or experiencing symptoms, just knowing that those policies exist is an incentive to join.

And so that increases your pool.

Definitely.

I think it's so important that we have guidelines for all different phases of your life, really.

So, in British AOE, we've got obviously pregnancy guidelines and policies, but we have menopause guidelines which have been in place for two years now.

Coming up, our story part three:

Drones and Robot Dogs.

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This is Marketplace.

I'm Kai Rizdahl.

Part three of our stories today, making the workers you've got more productive.

That's how Neela and I found ourselves in the London borough of Southwark a couple of days ago.

It had kind of Silicon Valley vibes.

Before we start, join tea and coffee.

He's asked already.

Thank you very much.

Very nice of you.

Except British.

And I should remind you here that I just don't like scary things.

Oh,

man, it's alive.

Don't like them at all.

I'm sorry.

Oh, this freaks me out.

That nightmare fuel sound that you hear is one of those robot dog things you've perhaps seen video of, stamping its four scary little legs.

It's blue and gray, vaguely skeletal, about the size size of a King Charles Spaniel.

Yila and I watched it walk out of a conference room, down a hallway, and it turned around and I swear to you, it looked at me.

Oh, that's freaky.

Don't make it sit up like that.

Oh, God.

It just blew you a kiss.

Oh,

man.

Let me just say right here, the video of it is on our Instagram, MarketplaceAPM.

We were at a healthcare logistics company called Apian.

Hamad Jaylani, the guy we're talking to, is a medical doctor by training.

Used to work for the UK's National Health Service, the NHS.

And now he and this company he co-founded are partnering with the NHS to use robots like that blue dog thing and drones to carry medical samples and tests and the like inside and between hospitals.

So with the robot dog waiting patiently in the corner, we sat down at a conference room table that had a big quadcopter drone sitting right on it.

So what is the idea?

What's the problem you're trying to solve here?

In In a nutshell, it's using automation to make healthcare better, to make everything more

efficient.

Because the NHS, like lots of other parts of all the economies, have a labor problem, right?

Yeah, of course.

So, I can share with some statistics.

Yeah, please do.

Sure.

So, the number of people that are going to be aged 85 or older, so you know, quite elderly, not even, you know, yes, I accept that 50-year-olds aren't that old, 70-year-olds out there old, but we're talking 85 years and older, where they're going to be having lots of care.

That population is projected to double in twenty forty five.

Meanwhile, on the flip side, the population aged twenty to thirty four, where you would say are your healthiest, strongest, most active workforce, that's expected to decrease by twenty sixty three.

So if you've got an aging population, you've got a decreasing workforce and you've got increasing demands on the healthcare system, how on earth are you going to meet those if you don't have good logistics moving all of those items around to every single person's home in individualized, whether it be rapid diagnostic test kits, whether it be blood sample test kits.

And that's what we want to fundamentally redesign.

There is a lot.

I took away that, in your medical opinion, 50 years old isn't old.

So that's the one thing.

But I'd like to break that answer apart a little bit.

First, you said that people would be responsible for their

large aspects of their own health care,

which meant delivery of maybe test kits, for example.

If it's automated and people are responsible for certain aspects of their own health care, where is the person that helps bridge the gap between getting the thing and doing the thing?

Well, it won't be a person, that's the point.

Or at least we don't believe that it'll be a person making all those decisions.

No, it's going to be an automated system that determines this subset of the population, they need to be targeted because we think that they're at a high risk of bowel cancer.

So we're going to send them out testing kits.

All of these things require good logistics, and you're absolutely spot on to say that as time goes on people will only become more and more responsible for the health.

In fact, that's what the government wants.

It's what health systems around the world are pushing for.

So you and your co-founders were sitting around the doctor's lounge one day and said, let's invent a drone delivery system?

Kind of, yes.

So Chris, Dr.

Chris, and myself, we were in our second year of medical training and we saw a competition that was being run by the UK Space Agency, which was all about how you can use satellite technology to improve life on Earth.

And both of us with our backgrounds, so to talk a little bit about my background, I'm originally from Afghanistan.

So drones have always been on my mind for the very wrong reason, delivering bombs instead of blood.

But it was, you know, I have a very strong bone in my body, which is about using technology for good to improve access to healthcare.

And that's a really big thing.

It's all about access.

So you're starting with blood samples, is that correct?

Is that the focus?

We've done more than blood samples, but a core focus of ours is blood samples because it's urgent, it's high volume, something like 90 plus percent of all diagnostics, of all care is underpinned by laboratory medicine.

So for a blood sample, for instance, how does it work?

So before I answer the kind of flow of

how, you need to understand the why.

So if you take what we're doing right now at Guys and St.

Thompson as an example, sample turns up at Guy's hospital, in the outpatient center, or in the inpatient, if you're an inpatient, goes to the lab, a porter takes it, or a nurse takes it, or it goes by the pneumatic tube system.

So

human involved in the taking of the blood.

Human delivering the blood from wherever you are to the lab.

Human then processing that sample, unpackaging it, and then scanning it in.

Human then putting it into a packing list to say this needs to go in a specific bag with this other group of samples to go to this specific location.

Human then picks it up and takes it to the van.

Human then drives that van.

Human then take gets out of the van and walks around the campus for five minutes, waits for the lift for five minutes, takes 10 minutes to get up the goddamn lift, and then takes 10 minutes to get to the lab.

It's a lot of humans.

It's a lot of humans and it's a total waste of time.

So of the six or eight humans we just talked about, some number of them, four, five, six maybe ish even yeah are going to be cut out of the loop by this quadcopter.

This is the drone and this quadruped robot and the robotic process automation.

Or at least if you're not removing the human from that loop, that unnecessary step, you are making them more efficient.

So we're going to have at some point, and I'm sure you've done tests and whatnot, but we're going to have these three and a half foot, four foot diameter quadcopters buzzing blood samples all around London.

Yeah, I mean they're doing it right now.

You've got blood samples flying over your head from guys, St.

Thomas's, cutting down a journey of what is more than 35 minutes to two minutes, and the fact that

it's not just about the speed, as it's the reliability and the automated and the efficient nature of it.

You know, the grand vision of this is such that you might need a hip operation one day.

In fact, I'll say you're quite likely to need a hip operation one day.

May you live long enough and have a healthy life.

I want it to be a world in which you come in, you have a chat with your doctor, doctor, you agree that you're going to need a hip operation.

And from that moment, that entire logistics piece is completely automated.

There's no human making a decision.

So you've come in, the electronic healthcare records state that you're booked in to have a hip operation on the 25th of August.

Apian system or the systems that are at play here can take abstract that information, Send that over to the medical device manufacturer that is right for you, get it manufactured just in time, get that from that local warehouse to your local hospital, no earlier than when you need it, reduce the stock on the shelves, reduce it from expiring for the right person at the right time.

And this has to happen, and your business model relies on this having to happen because we have an aging population and a declining prime age workforce.

Yeah, and what you're going to do, hire a million people just to sit in an office working out where things should flow.

It works, maybe now, and we're struggling.

It certainly won't be scaled.

That's not scalable.

Technologically speaking, how far are we from your grand vision?

How How many years?

A couple.

We're working really hard.

Oh, come on.

A couple.

Blink a few times, give it a few years, less than three, and you'll see how much of this we have automated.

We're already deploying drones, we're about to deploy the quadruped robots, and we're already deploying robotic process automation RPA, essentially bots on a screen that can book things in and book porters.

And so we're already deploying those three levels of technology: automated flying robot, automated walking robot, automated clicking robot.

Right?

Everything you can kind of broadly categorize into one of those three.

Technology is one way to keep an economy growing as the labor force shrinks.

There is another option, though, and that'll be tomorrow on The Age of Work, live from the UK.

Once again, too much content, not enough time to do a final other than to say this.

That robot dog thing, man, I'm telling you, scary on the videos, freaky in real life.

Our media production team includes Brian Allison, Jake Cherry, Jessen Dueller, Drew Jostad, Gary O'Keefe, Charlton, Thorpe One Colors, Torado, and Becca One, and Jeff Peters is the manager of media production.

And I'm Kyle Rizdahl.

We will see you tomorrow, everybody.

This is APM.

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