Mabu, a robot roughly the size of a kitchen appliance made by a startup called Catalia Health, has been working with Kaiser Permanente patients over the last year. (Patients don’t pay for the robot, Kaiser does.) Within the next couple of months, it will also begin with rheumatoid arthritis and late-stage kidney cancer patients, funded by pharmaceutical companies who make drugs to treat those conditions. The goal: help patients with chronic diseases get better care than they could in a system run by humans with limited time. Unlike a lot of other home health tech, the robot isn’t focused on reminding patients to take medication. “Most [others] take the form of reminders: glowing and beeping pill bottles and pill caps and text messaging systems and apps for your smartphone,” says founder and CEO Cory Kidd, who previously researched human-robot interaction at MIT Media Lab.