JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Background:

The interest in digital technologies in health care is increasing and can be a way of relieving the burden on health care professionals. This relief can lead on the one hand to higher job satisfac-tion an on the other hand to a higher attractiveness of the nursing profession. Social robots are regarded as a special form of technology that can be usefully applied in nursing because of their focus on interpersonal contacts. They differ from service robots by their additionally brought forward empathetic behavior during the execution of activities. The implementation of robots raises ethical questions. While the implementation progresses slowly there is a need for the de-bate about concepts and applications.

Objective:

In addition to existing studies with a focus on societal attitudes to social robots there is a need for concepts and evaluation of the potential of social robots in nursing. This elaboration enables to channel scientific findings and developments. It is important to take the perspectives of health care professionals and patients into account.

Methods:

An expert workshop with 88 participants (health care professionals and educators, (PhD-) stu-dents of medicine, health care, nursing and technology, patient advocates, software developers, representatives from government, and research fellows) from Austria, Germany and Switzer-land was held in February 2020. The workshop included group discussions, presentations on social robots and short plays of different future scenarios. These four future scenarios served as a basis for the discussions and showed the possibility of analogue nursing, completely robotic nursing, teams of robots and nursing staff (Deep Care) as well as nurses supported by robots (Smart Care).

Results:

In the discussions most groups opted for Smart Care. The experts saw a need for implementa-tion through skills labs and multidisciplinary development teams. However, the discussions also revealed that there is a strong need for the development of eHealth literacy in society, a change in the training of nurses and concepts that transcend sector boundaries.

Conclusions:

It became clear that the decision for or against a scenario was strongly dependent on one’s own experiences and values. Therefore, there is a strong need to ascertain the wishes of society re-garding the future of care.