Caregiver Views on Prospective Use of Robotic Care in Helping Children Adapt to Hospitalization

Abstract

Children in hospitals endure a variety of stressful situations. Children feel friendly toward and have fun with robots. Care robots are considered to be an alternate technique to relieve stress after hospitalization. A mixed-methods study was conducted on caregivers to understand the ideal care robot. One hundred and fifty caregivers of pediatric patients participated in a quantitative online survey, and eleven participated in focus group interviews for qualitative analysis. Quantitative data underwent descriptive statistics. Content analysis was conducted for qualitative data. Regarding the overall awareness and necessity of a care robot, the caregivers thought it would help patients adapt to the hospital environment more quickly. The caregivers’ preferred character-shaped robots of child height. For sound, they preferred an animated character’s voice. For movement, they preferred the robot to roll on wheels. Regarding functions, medicine was the item for which they most wanted to use game elements. For the educational element, the caregivers wanted to teach children the reasons for and methods of medicine administration. Four themes were derived from the qualitative results. The findings are expected to contribute to the future development of care robots that can assist pediatric patients.

Bridging the Gap: Exploring Opportunities, Challenges, and Problems in Integrating Assistive Technologies, Robotics, and Automated Machines into the Health Domain

“…To explore the opportunities, challenges, issues, and bottlenecks of integrating these tools (alone or interconnected) into the domain, this Special Issue [10] was initiated in May 2022, and was subsequently completed in January 2023. This Special Issue collected 17 contributions plus an editorial [1,[11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23][24][25][26][27], and covered a wide range of topics, including:…”

“…Jin et al [24] assumed that children in the health domain face a lot of stressful circumstances, and that robots may create fun and friendly environments for children. They investigated the desirable requirements of care robots for producing outcomes, which contributes to highlighting the importance of the robots for assisting patients of pediatric age in the health domain in the future.…”

“…The important interest of scholars in the field of robotics, both as regards rehabilitation aspects [12,14,17] (also through protocols that simulate sports activities [17]), and in the applications of social robotics [19,24], and as regards technological-propulsive aspects [21];…”