Acceptance of Healthcare Robots for the Older Population: Review and Future Directions

By Elizabeth Broadbent, Rebecca Q. Stafford, B. Macdonald. 2009

862 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The rapidly ageing population is placing increasing strain on healthcare services. Robots have been proposed as a way to assist people to stay healthy and safe in their own homes. However, despite the need for such assistive devices and the success of some healthcare robots, other robots have had a poor response. This article reviews the literature about human responses to healthcare robots and summarises the variables that have been found to influence responses. It may be possible to increase acceptance of healthcare robots by properly assessing the needs of the human user and then matching the robot’s role, appearance and behaviour to these needs. Because robots have limitations in their abilities, another way to increase acceptance may be to modify the expectations of users to better match robots’ abilities. More research needs to investigate potential users’ needs and expectations in specific situations and whether interventions to increase the match between robot and human can increase acceptance.

Subfields: Applied Psychology, Artificial Intelligence, Social Psychology

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Citations in the corpus

Space-Time Representation of People Based on 3D Skeletal Data: A Review (2016, background): “As an integral component of reasoning systems, approaches to construct human representations have been widely used in a variety of real-world applications, including video analysis [1], surveillance [2], robotics [3], humanmachine interaction [4], augmented and virtual reality [5], assistive living ”
Robots that can adapt like animals (2014, background): “As described in experiment 5 of the Supplementary Information, the evaluated behaviour descriptors characterize the following: (1) time each leg is in contact with the ground (‘Duty factor’); (2) orientation of the robot frame (‘Orientation’); (3) instantaneous velocity of the robot (‘Displacement’)”
Population Ageing and Socially Assistive Robots for Elderly Persons: The Importance of Sociodemographic Factors for User Acceptance (2012, background): “[2] Health care robots Review of the literature on human responses to healthcare robots Age, gender, technological experience, education,”
Robots in Society, Society in Robots - Mutual Shaping of Society and Technology as a Framework for Social Robot Design (2010, background): “Researchers also propose that the characteristics of users as well as those of robots need to be considered when designing robots for particular applications, such as elder-care [3].”
Socially Assistive Robots in Elderly Care: A Mixed-Method Systematic Literature Review (2014, background): “Moreover, aging at home is encouraged by governments to alleviate the cost of aged care facilities (Broadbent et al., 2009) and is societies’ preferred choice (Vega & González, 2012).”
The Role of Healthcare Robots for Older People at Home: A Review (2014, background): “it and use it as they should [15].”
Service robot implementation: a theoretical framework and research agenda (2019, background): “Research pertaining to caregiving services suggests that clients may develop relationships with robots (Broadbent et al., 2009), whereas in a more commercial setting (e.g. ﬁ nancial services), robots might be hard pressed to enhance the relational nature of the service encounter.”
Examining the effects of robots' physical appearance, warmth, and competence in frontline services: The Humanness‐Value‐Loyalty model (2021, background): “For robots, simple social behaviors, such as establishing eye contact or nodding the head as a sign of attention enhance perceptions of responsiveness and sympathy (Broadbent et al., 2009; Kanda et al., 2007), suggesting that social contact has been established (cf., Č ai ć et al., 2018).”
A Systematic Review of Attitudes, Anxiety, Acceptance, and Trust Towards Social Robots (2020, background): “Although reviews have been conducted in this area [31, 34, 41, 55], none have com-”
Robots or frontline employees? Exploring customers’ attributions of responsibility and stability after service failure or success (2020, background): “Another key distinction between SST and robots is the fact that the former is not usually involved in physical tasks (Broadbent et al., 2009).”