My business or not? The perspective of technology companies on shifting towards care robotics

ABSTRACT

Many countries are investing in the development of robotic applications for health and elderly care services. Some care robots have already been commercialized, and new products are being prepared for future markets. However, generating profitable business from care robots is somewhat challenging and the business ecosystem is growing quite slowly. This paper focuses on emerging care robot business opportunities from the perspective of companies operating on the care technology field. Based on interviews of 10 companies and an online survey data of 13 companies, all from Finland, we highlight the potential and barriers in the care robot business, and suggest actions supporting the growing ecosystem. By using the service ecosystem framework, we describe the business enablers and challenges in a care robot context.

KEYWORDS:

• Care robotics
• service ecosystem
• health and care technologies
• service business orientation

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 ISO 8373: https://www.iso.org/obp/ui/#iso:std:iso:8373:ed-2:v1:en. Sometimes purely non-physical computer-based assistants – such as so-called virtual agents or artificial intelligence software solutions that perform routine assistive tasks on computers – are termed robots as well. Non-physical robots are beyond the scope of this paper.

2 http://roseproject.aalto.fi/en/

Additional information

Funding

This research is supported by the Strategic Research Council at the Academy of Finland, [project name: Robots and the Future of Welfare Services (ROSE), decision numbers: 292980, 314180] and the LUT Research Platform on Smart Services for Digitalisation (DIGI-USER).