Patients’ behavioral intentions toward robotic adoption in healthcare: An approach on apprehension of embedding robotics

The ubiquitous healthcare sector requires a variegated set of emerging innovations and advanced technologies in the healthcare sector. Healthcare stakeholders in a turbulent marketplace continuously strive to maintain relevance; thus, the healthcare robotics notion has emerged to become a game-changer in the human realm. These emerging systems provide new possibilities to create a core value for stakeholders, specifically care providers and care receivers, in the turbulent environment. Although robotics is moving forward in healthcare, human inertia and apprehension are still anchors exerting robotics. Human behaviors and attitudes may change with time and in different circumstances. This paper aims to contribute a new perspective to the patients’ degree of apprehensions—trust, ethical, privacy, and legal concerns—which affect their behavioral intentions toward robotics adoption in healthcare by considering the moderating effect of social crises, including the aging and COVID-19 pandemic. The brink of a robotic era is encountered with challenges, including the aging population and COVID-19 for public and private healthcare stakeholders worldwide. Hence, this study’s essential support is to investigate emerging technology adoption and hurdles to ascertain how the patients’ behavioral intentions might affect robotic adoption in healthcare. Furthermore, this paper examines the anchors’ factors that affect individual behavioral intentions to successfully propose remedies to embed robotics in the human realm. The results indicate that trust, privacy, and ethical concerns are direct predictors of behavioral intentions toward robotic adoption. Moreover, behavioral intentions toward robotics adoption significantly affect the actual use of robotics in the healthcare industry in the future. Furthermore, social inertia, including aging and pandemics, significantly and positively affects behavioral intentions toward healthcare robotic adoption and use. Finally, both aging and pandemic positive interactions affect actual robotic use in the future of the healthcare industry.