Receptivity & Interaction of Social Robots in Hospitals

For social robots to be deployed in an interaction-centred environment such as a hospital, entities need to understand how to design human-robot interactions for the technology to be adopted successfully. For instance, if the robot was to be placed at a hospital concierge, it would need to engage visitors similar to a human concierge, either through verbal or non-verbal gestures (social cues). In this study, we investigate two hypotheses. Firstly, we hypothesized that various attention-drawing social cues significantly correlate to the receptivity of the robot. Secondly, we hypothesized that humans preferred medium of information transfer is through verbal interaction. We set up a humanoid concierge robot, Cruzr, in a hospital for 5 days as a trial. Our findings indicate an increase in receptivity when Cruzr performed a social cue as compared to neutral mode and that the preferred mode of communication was touch over voice.