Acceptability of Using a Robotic Nursing Assistant in Health Care Environments: Experimental Pilot Study

Abstract

Background According to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, nurses will be the largest labor pool in the United States by 2022, and more than 1.1 million nursing positions have to be filled by then in order to avoid a nursing shortage. In addition, the incidence rate of musculoskeletal disorders in nurses is above average in comparison with other occupations. Robot-assisted health care has the potential to alleviate the nursing shortage by automating mundane and routine nursing tasks. Furthermore, robots in health care environments may assist with safe patient mobility and handling and may thereby reduce the likelihood of musculoskeletal disorders. Objective This pilot study investigates the perceived ease of use and perceived usefulness (acceptability) of a customized service robot as determined by nursing students (as proxies for nursing staff in health care environments). This service robot, referred to as the Adaptive Robotic Nurse Assistant (ARNA), was developed to enhance the productivity of nurses through cooperation during physical tasks (eg, patient walking, item fetching, object delivery) as well as nonphysical tasks (eg, patient observation and feedback). This pilot study evaluated the acceptability of ARNA to provide ambulatory assistance to patients. Methods We conducted a trial with 24 participants to collect data and address the following research question: Is the use of ARNA as an ambulatory assistive device for patients acceptable to nurses? The experiments were conducted in a simulated hospital environment. Nursing students (as proxies for nursing staff) were grouped in dyads, with one participant serving as a nurse and the other acting as a patient. Two questionnaires were developed and administrated to the participants based on the Technology Acceptance Model with respect to the two subscales of perceived usefulness and perceived ease of use metrics. In order to evaluate the internal consistency/reliability of the questionnaires, we calculated Cronbach alpha coefficients. Furthermore, statistical analyses were conducted to evaluate the relation of each variable in the questionnaires with the overall perceived usefulness and perceived ease of use metrics. Results Both Cronbach alpha values were acceptably high (.93 and .82 for perceived usefulness and perceived ease of use questionnaires, respectively), indicating high internal consistency of the questionnaires. The correlation between the variables and the overall perceived usefulness and perceived ease of use metrics was moderate. The average perceived usefulness and perceived ease of use metrics among the participants were 4.13 and 5.42, respectively, out of possible score of 7, indicating a higher-than-average acceptability of this service robot. Conclusions The results served to identify factors that could affect nurses’ acceptance of ARNA and aspects needing improvement (eg, flexibility, ease of operation, and autonomy level).

Robots as Patient Sitters

“…It is a service robot capable of providing both physical assistance and remote teleoperation to a human user and is also capable of autonomous operation. Novel technological contributions in the development of ARNA include its multi-sensor instrumentation board for heteroceptive sensing, a software architecture that facilitates rapid transition between different autonomy levels to carry out different tasks, and a neuroadaptive controller that enables the incorporation of task and user preferences to allow the robot to be used with users of varying abilities in similar and different tasks 11,21 . To complete the tasks in this study, the ARNA robot was designed to perform the following functions: (1) autonomous navigation in unstructured environments, (2) pick and place certain classes of objects in the environment, (3) heteroceptive sensing of environments and human health, and (4) interface with a human user via physical and teleoperative means.…”

Effect of customer's perception on service robot acceptance

“…As shown in Appendix Table A1, we collected 20 papers published from 2017 to 2020 about user acceptance of service robots. These studies used theories including TAM (Hwa et al., 2018; Saadatzi et al., 2020), UTAUT (Guggemos et al., 2020; Kencebay, 2019), DIT (Khaksar et al., 2019), Attribution Theory (Belanche et al., 2020), Self‐Congruity Theory (Dudek et al., 2020), and Uncanny Valley Theory (Appel et al., 2020). Based on TAM/UTAUT, relevant studies have also created new models, such as RAM (Turja et al., 2019), HRCAM (Bröhl et al., 2019), an AIDUT (Lin et al., 2019).…”

Views on Using Social Robots in Professional Caregiving: Content Analysis of a Scenario Method Workshop

“…In speculating whether robots will have a role in providing care, we need to consider acceptance by both service recipients and professionals. This depends on the roles that robots undertake and the potential for expressing empathy [ 24 , 25 ]. The development of empathic robots is still at an early stage.…”