Accepted for/Published in: Journal of Medical Internet Research
Date Submitted: Mar 4, 2022
Open Peer Review Period: Mar 4, 2022 - Apr 29, 2022
Date Accepted: Sep 16, 2022
(closed for review but you can still tweet)
Warning: This is an author submission that is not peer-reviewed or edited. Preprints - unless they show as "accepted" - should not be relied on to guide clinical practice or health-related behavior and should not be reported in news media as established information.
Enhancing Nurse–Robot Engagement: Two-Wave Survey Study
ABSTRACT
Background:
Robots are introduced into healthcare contexts to assist healthcare professionals. However, we do not know how nurses assess assistive robots and how such assessments influence nurse–robot engagement.
Objective:
To examine how the benefits and maintenance of robots, and nurses’ personal innovativeness impact nurses’ attitudes to robots and nurse–robot engagement.
Methods:
Our study adopted a two-wave follow-up design. We surveyed 358 registered nurses in operating rooms in a large-scale medical center in Taiwan. The first-wave data were collected from October to November 2019. The second-wave data were collected from December 2019 to February 2020. We successfully followed 331 nurses throughout our study.
Results:
Robot benefits and nurses’ personal innovativeness are positively related to nurses’ attitudes toward robots (=.63 and .18, p<.05). Robot benefits are positively related to nurse–robot engagement (=.13, p<.05), while robot maintenance requirements are negatively related to nurse–robot engagement (=-.15, p<.05). Our model explained 50% of the variance in nurses’ attitudes toward robots and 53% of the variance in nurse–robot engagement. Hence, our results are both relevant and significant.
Conclusions:
Our study is the first to examine how the benefits and maintenance requirements of assistive robots influence nurses’ engagement with them. The findings contribute to our understanding of how nurses assess assistive robots and how to design robots to increase nurse–robot engagement, thus better embedding robots into healthcare contexts. We found that the impact of robot benefits on nurse–robot engagement outweighs the impact of robot maintenance requirements. Hence, robot makers should consider emphasizing design and communication of robot benefits in the healthcare context.
Citation
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Copyright
© The authors. All rights reserved. This is a privileged document currently under peer-review/community review (or an accepted/rejected manuscript). Authors have provided JMIR Publications with an exclusive license to publish this preprint on it's website for review and ahead-of-print citation purposes only. While the final peer-reviewed paper may be licensed under a cc-by license on publication, at this stage authors and publisher expressively prohibit redistribution of this draft paper other than for review purposes.