Currently submitted to: JMIR Aging
Date Submitted: Jul 31, 2026
Open Peer Review Period: Aug 2, 2026 - Sep 27, 2026
(currently open for review)
Warning: This is an author submission that is not peer-reviewed or edited. Preprints - unless they show as "accepted" - should not be relied on to guide clinical practice or health-related behavior and should not be reported in news media as established information.
China’s Humanoid-Robotics Strategy and Health Care Applications: Lessons From a Field Mission
ABSTRACT
China is deploying humanoid robots at unprecedented scale, underpinned by a state strategy mobilising more than US$20 billion in subsidies. An 18-site field mission across Shanghai, Hangzhou and Beijing (June 2026) found that despite remarkable hardware maturity, health care use cases for humanoid robots remain largely ill-defined, with evidence-based deployment methodology largely absent. This Viewpoint argues that the humanoid form has genuine but limited transitional value in care settings, identifies a strategic gap between China’s industrial logic and health technology development standards, and highlights a closing window: European and North American institutions retain recognised expertise in evidence-based care protocols that will constitute the critical training data for tomorrow’s AI-driven care robots.
Citation
Request queued. Please wait while the file is being generated. It may take some time.
Copyright
© The authors. All rights reserved. This is a privileged document currently under peer-review/community review (or an accepted/rejected manuscript). Authors have provided JMIR Publications with an exclusive license to publish this preprint on it's website for review and ahead-of-print citation purposes only. While the final peer-reviewed paper may be licensed under a cc-by license on publication, at this stage authors and publisher expressively prohibit redistribution of this draft paper other than for review purposes.