Social Robots and Human Touch in Care: The Perceived Usefulness of Robot Assistance Among Healthcare Professionals

Abstract

Touching in care work is inevitable, particularly in cases where clients depend on nurses for many activities of daily living, such as bathing, dressing, lifting and assisting. When new technologies are involved in nurse–client relationships, the significance of human touch needs special attention. Stressing the importance of practitioners’ opinions on the usage of robots in care environments, we analyze care workers’ attitudes toward robot assistance in the care of older people and reflect on their ideas of the embodied relationship that caregivers and care receivers have with technology. To examine nurses’ attitudes toward care robots, we use survey data on professional care workers (n = 3800), including random samples of registered and practical nurses working primarily in elderly care. As the theoretical framework for analyzing the empirical data, we apply two different conceptual approaches regarding human touch: nursing ethics and the phenomenological theory of embodiment. The empirical results suggest that the care workers are significantly more approving of robot assistance for lifting heavy materials compared to the moving patients. Generally, the care workers have reservations about the idea of utilizing autonomous robots in tasks that typically involve human touch, such as assisting the elderly in the bathroom.