An Exploratory Study of Health Professionals' Attitudes about Robotic Telepresence Technology

Abstract

This article presents the results from a video-based evaluation study of a social robotic telepresence solution for elderly. The evaluated system is a mobile teleoperated robot called Giraff that allows caregivers to virtually enter a home and conduct a natural visit just as if they were physically there. The evaluation focuses on the perspectives from primary healthcare organizations and collects the feedback from different categories of health professionals. The evaluation included 150 participants and yielded unexpected results with respect to the acceptance of the Giraff system. In particular, greater exposure to technology did not necessarily increase acceptance and large variances occurred between the categories of health professionals. In addition to outlining the results, this study provides a number of indications with respect to increasing acceptance for technology for elderly.

KEYWORDS:

• evaluation
• human-robot interaction
• organizational perspective

Acknowledgments

We would like to acknowledge Giraff Technologies and Tim Kerns who produced the video used in the video evaluation. The ExCITE project is supported by EU under the Ambient Assisted Living Joint Programme (AAL-2009-2-125).

Notes

Note. F = Female, M = Male; Habituation to Skype and Wii (1 = habit of using, 0 = no habit of using), game playing and whether or not they regard the use of computers and internet as a natural part of current and future work (1 = Fully agree, 5 = Fully disagree).

Note. 1 = Fully agree, 5 = Fully disagree. Mean values marked with an * are discussed within the article.

Note. 1 = Fully agree, 5 = Fully disagree. Mean values marked with an * are discussed within the article.

Note. Amount of teachers responding is six. 1 = Fully agree, 5 = Fully disagree.

Note. The amount of teachers responding per question is given in parenthesis. 1 = Fully agree, 5 = Fully disagree.

ExCITE is an Ambient Assisted Living project which purpose is—in an in-situ, longitudinal, and pan-European scale—to evaluate user requirements for robotic telepresence employing the Giraff platform. For more information please visit: http://www.excite-project.eu