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

Abstract

IntroductionOur aging population presents new challenges for the economy and healthcare systems particularly as the number of caregivers per elderly is expected to decrease (e.g. Acosta-Calderon, 2011;Michaud et al., 2007; United Nations, 2006). The fields of telemedicine and telecare have the potential to provide solutions which are particularly attractive for countries with low population densities. In such countries, social isolation could decrease the possibility of elderly people to remain independent and therefore, increase their need for institutional care. While technology can be of help, the uptake of solutions will be highly dependent on the conviction that the technology meets the needs of elderly as well as primary and secondary caregivers while maintaining adequate quality of care. In order to ensure that developed solutions meet the needs of a diverse group of end users, a common approach is to perform extensive end user evaluations to assess the attitude from elderly and/or caregivers. The caregiver and healthcare professionals in particular are an important group as their willingness to accept new technology is determinant in providing the technology to the elderly and ensuring that it is used. In this regards it is therefore important to consider the high variations in professions and roles of primary caregivers when assessing their feedback. In addition, within the different professional roles, there are also differences that depend on experience, age, work processes and tools, exposure to technology etc.In this study we consider an organizational perspective in the evaluation of a technology solution which has not yet penetrated the market but is seen as a close to market solution, if meeting the requirements of end-users (primary and secondary). The system that is evaluated is Giraff, a system for social robotic telepresence. The Giraff in Fig. 1 provides a means for achieving remote communication between two parties. The communication shares similarities with a traditional phone call, i.e. a call is made and this is either accepted or rejected by the owner of the robot. On one end, there is a 163 cm high robot and on the other end there is a client interface from which a remote user can pilot the robot while speaking through a microphone and a web camera. The Giraff unit consists of a screen and web camera that are mounted on a tilt unit attached to the robotic base. .The Giraff also has its own charging station to which the remote user docks before terminating a call. The owner of a Giraff is not required to have any technological knowledge since the handling of the Giraff is done remotely, (see Fig. 2). INS FIG. 1 and FIG. 2 In the evaluation study of the Giraff robot, we consider three categories of primary caregivers (audiologists, nurses and occupational therapists). Within each category we focus on two groups, teachers and students. The evaluation is conducted by presenting a video where a scenario in which Giraff was used to communicate with an elderly was shown to the various evaluat...

A Review of Mobile Robotic Telepresence

“…Similar concerns (i.e. loss of human interaction and replacement of professionals and staff) were found in a video-based evaluation regarding the Giraff system with different groups of primary health care organizations [73]. In this study, the teachers were more positive than students (as in [57]), demonstrating that a greater exposure to technology does not necessarily increase the acceptance.…”

“…It was also found in this study that there were large variances between different categories of primary caregivers. The study [73] provides a number of suggestions with respect to increasing the acceptance of technology for elderly, for example, early introduction to technology during the education.…”

“…The methodology is somewhat similar to the one proposed in [71] which included prototyping, field testing in residential care settings, assessment of for, example, satisfaction, and further development. Within the scope of the project, a number of experiments have been reported which concern (1) health care professional views on MRP systems and a comparison between junior and senior professionals and (2) measures for successful interaction with real elderly groups that include physiological measures as well as measuring spatial and social presence [72][73][74][75][76].…”

Immersive Virtual Environment as a Promising Tool for the Elderly-Friendly Assistive Robot Design

“…The barriers due to impairments of elders' physical status are cognitive (memory and processing speed, visual, auditory, and motor control abilities [23]). The mental barriers are attitudinal (manner of feeling or behaving; [24,25]) privacy concerns, security [26], safety (monitoring elderly in their private home; [27][28][29][30][31]), and total replacement of humans with technology tools such as robots [32,33]. Also, much of the literature on human factors in HRI has emphasized the importance of perceived safety, usefulness, self-efficacy, learning support, and experience, etc.…”

Assessment of interaction quality in mobile robotic telepresence

“…Of these studies, some works examine the pilot user's perspective such as e.g. [6,7,11] and very few have examined the elderly people's perspective. Some notable exceptions include [2] that included 12 elderly who experienced using a MRP system both as local users and pilot users.…”