A descriptive statistical analysis of volume, visibility and attitudes regarding nursing and care robots in social media

Abstract

Background: Technology in the healthcare sector is undergoing rapid development. One of the most prominent areas of healthcare in which robots are implemented is nursing homes. However, nursing and technology are often considered as being contradictory, an attitude originating in the view of “the natural” versus “the artificial”. Social media mirror this view, including in attitudes and societal debates regarding nursing and care robots. However, little is known about this topic in previous research. Objectives: To examine user behaviour in social media platforms on the topic of nursing and care robots. Design: A retrospective and cross-sectional observation study design was applied. Methods: Data were collected via the Alchemy streaming application programming interface. Data from social media were collected from 1 January 2014 to 5 January 2016. The data set consisted of 12,311 mentions in total. Results: Nursing and care robots are a small-scale topic of discussion in social media. Twitter was found to be the largest channel in terms of volume, followed by Tumblr. News channels had the highest percentage of visibility, while forums and Tumblr had the least. It was found in the data that 67.9% of the mentions were positive, 24.4% were negative and 7.8% were neutral. Discussion: The volume and visibility of the data on nursing robots found in social media, as well as the attitudes to nursing robots found there, indicate that nursing care robots, which are seen as representing a next step in technological development in healthcare, are a topic on the rise in social media. These findings are likely to be related to the idea that nursing care robots are on the breakthrough of replacing human labour in healthcare worldwide.