Teaming up with robots: Analysing potential and challenges with healthcare workers and defining teamwork

Abstract

In interviews with healthcare workers, we explore the potential and challenges of future deployment of robotic assistance systems in healthcare. We focus on individual expectations, wishes and fears. We especially emphasize the potential role of robotic systems in team dynamics. Will robots be coworkers in the future or are they expected to be tools? Irrespective of that, are they anticipated to change coworking within a team? Following a grounded theoretical approach, we aim to generate new theories and research questions on robotic assistance systems from the perspective of healthcare workers. We find that healthcare workers are generally optimistic about the implementation of technology in their workplace and not all have pressing concerns. Paradoxically, we further find that reasoning for why a robot could be part of a team are similar among participants who are opposed to robots in teams and those who are in favour. While participants only focused on work- and task-related criteria when arguing why a robot could be a future colleague, they presented work-and task-unrelated criteria for why a robot could not be one. We discuss the expected impact of robotic assistance systems on work teams in healthcare and pose resulting questions to inspire future hypothetico-inferential research on human-robot teams. We conclude with arguing why current team definitions do not fit human-robot teams and propose a new theoretical model for teams that include humans and robots.