Le Trung of Toronto, inspired by anime, has built an android to assist the elderly. Dubbed Aiko, the bot is currently more of an anthropomorphic reminder-device, telling its’ users when to take meds for instance, but Trung hopes that Aiko will one day be able to move about. Which is good, because Aiko looks eerily like a crippled RealDoll – I suspect that if Trung were to make her a little more ‘dual-purpose’ (if you catch my drift) he’d have no problem finding funding.

Just sayin’.

Aiko isn’t at the tea-making stage just yet, but she’s certainly talented. According to Trung she can speak 13, 000 sentences in English and Japanese, knows the weather and can differentiate between people and objects. Having spent part of his childhood in Japan, Trung says that he was inspired to build the robot by the animated television shows he watched as a kid.

“As a kid I watched a lot of robot anime,” he explained. “I would watch it every day and say ‘when I grow up I’m gonna build a robot.’ So there you go.”