Personals attitudes towards robot assisted health care - a pilot study in 111 respondents

The aim of this survey was to examine health care professional's attitudes towards technology involving support from artificial intelligence (AI), robots and humanoids. Within 10-15 years, every third student has to choose occupation within the health care sector to obtain the current personal level, due to the aging population and retirement within the health service sector.

The preliminary investigation interviews presented a wide range of activities. These were nursing tasks, service tasks, monitoring/alarms, telemedicine and social communication. First, a five minutes presentation movie was presented. The movie demonstrated expected personal needs in the future and what robots and AI can do today and tomorrow. After this presentation, the 111 respondents, from different representative care institutions, replied on a questionnaire that dealt with selected areas identified above. The questions included different views of robots as supported aids in healthcare.

The respondents were overall negative using AI and robot technology related to caring activities. However, all groups were positive in using robots in service tasks, monitoring/alarms, telemedicine communication. Of 29 assertions, 18 were mostly positive and 13 of them were over 70 % positive. The frequency of positive and negative attitudes, were similar in the central areas. Within the caring area, a positive robot assisted task requires an interaction (collaboration): caregiver-robot-individual and subsequently, within the nursing area; robot assisted tasks must involve a certain degree of human caring.