Caregiving in its best form addresses challenges in a multitude of dimensions of a person’s life: from physical to social-emotional and sometimes even existential dimensions such as issues surrounding life and death. In this study, we use semi-structured qualitative interviews administered to healthcare professionals with multidisciplinary backgrounds (physicians, public health professionals, social workers, and chaplains) to understand their expectations regarding the possible roles robots may play in the healthcare ecosystem in the future. We found that participants drew inspiration in their mental models of robots from both works of science fiction but also from existing commercial robots. Throughout the paper, we point out the encouraging confluence of ideas between the expectations of healthcare providers and research trends in the human–robot interaction (HRI) literature.
@article{soljacicetal24,
title={Robots in healthcare as envisioned by care professional},
author={F. Soljacic and T. Law and M. Chita-Tegmark and M.Scheutz},
year={2024},
journal={\em Intelligent Service Robotics},
publisher={Springer},
url={https://hrilab.tufts.edu/publications/soljacicetal24.pdf}
}