Yes, this was one of the tragic aspects of Japan from BEFORE the quake. I have been reading articles in my engineering journals about how the Japanese are developing robots to tend to their elderly - truly a horrible mistaken priority for how to allocate effort on technology vs. simple compassion.
(Of course, it is easier to analyze Japan, than look more closely at what ails my own country....)
They use tech because they decided against from importing nurses from poor and down trodden countries