JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

As robots are increasingly designed for health management applications, it is critical to not only consider the effects robots will have on patients, but also a patient’s wider social network, including the patient’s caregivers and health care provides, among others. In this paper, we use a vignette-based study to investigate how a robot’s behavior (patient-centered or task-centered) can influence people’s evaluations of the robot itself (emotional intelligence, trustworthiness and acceptability) as well as people’s perceptions of the patient for whom the robot provides care, specifically, how people form impressions of the patient’s psychological attributes based on how the robot represents the patient. We found that a robot acting in a patient-centered manner will not only be perceived as having higher emotional intelligence (p=.003), but also cause people to form more positive impressions of the patient the robot cares for (p < .001). We replicate and expand these results to other domains such as dieting, learning and job training, and discuss the implied potential for robots to enhance human-human relationships in the health care context and beyond.