Social acceptance of a childcare support robot system

Abstract

This paper investigates people's social acceptance of a childcare support robot system and compares their attitudes to two childcare technologies: anesthesia during labor and baby food (processed food and formula milk), which includes powdered milk and instant food for babies and toddlers. To investigate their social acceptance, we developed scales from three points of view: safety and trustworthy, diligence, and decreasing workload. For this paper, our participants were comprised of 412 people located through a web-based survey and 14 people who experienced the prototype of our childcare support robot system. They answered questionnaires about our three developed scales and an intention to use scale to investigate their social acceptance toward childcare support technologies. The web-based survey results indicate that our system's concept was evaluated lower than current childcare support technologies, but people who experienced our system prototype evaluated it higher than those who filled out web-based surveys.