The Robot Screener Will See You Now: A Socially Assistive Robot for COVID-19 Screening in Long-Term Care Homes

The rapid spread of COVID-19 around the globe has increased the need to adopt autonomous social robots within our healthcare systems. In particular, socially assistive robots can help to improve the day-to-day functioning of our healthcare facilities including long-term care, while keeping residents and staff safe by performing repetitive tasks such as health screening. In this paper, we present the first human-robot interaction study with an autonomous multi-task socially assistive robot used for non-contact screening in long-term care homes. The robot monitors temperature, checks for face masks, and asks screening questions to minimize human-to-human contact. We investigated staff perceptions of 7 attributes: screening experience without and with the robot, efficiency, cognitive attitude, freeing up staff, safety, affective attitude, and intent to use the robot. Furthermore, we investigated the influence of demographics on these attributes. Study results show that, overall, staff rated these attributes high for the screening robot, with a statistically significant increase in cognitive attitude and safety after interacting with the robot. Differences between gender and occupation were also determined. Our study highlights the potential application of an autonomous screening robot for long-term care homes.