Privacy and utility perceptions of social robots in healthcare

Many Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) researchers are exploring the use of healthcare robots. Due to the sensitive nature of care, privacy concerns play a significant role in determining robot utility and adoption. While HRI research has explored some dimensions of privacy for robots in general, to our knowledge, no prior work has empirically studied how human-like robot design affects people's privacy and utility perceptions of robots across different healthcare contexts and tasks. We conducted a 3 × 3 × 3 study (n = 239) to understand these relationships, varying robot Human Likeness (HL) (low, medium, and high) and scenario/task type (hospital waiting room/robot check-in support, hospital patient room/robot mobility support, home care/robot neurorehabilitation support) via a mixed between-within subjects design. To our knowledge, this is one of the first studies that operationalizes complex constructs of privacy, healthcare, and HL across multiple realistic healthcare contexts, with a high degree of cognitive fidelity. Our results suggest the tasks and contexts in which privacy is considered in healthcare contexts with robots is more impactful than other factors like robot HL appearance. In particular, some settings include more complex tradeoffs between privacy and utility for robots than others. For example, HRI researchers and practitioners who want to build healthcare robots intended for the home may encounter the greatest challenges for balancing privacy risks. Finally, for the community, we demonstrate that design fiction animations can be a useful way to facilitate cognitive fidelity for supporting studies in HRI and serving as a bridge between narrative methods and the use of real-world robots.