Conditional acceptance of emotion-recognition-enabled smart care devices for home-based rehabilitation and elderly care: a dual-perspective survey of prospective users and family caregivers

Emotion-recognition-enabled smart care devices are increasingly proposed for home-based rehabilitation and elderly care, yet evidence on prospective user and family caregiver acceptance remains limited. This study investigated public attitudes, concerns, interaction preferences, and design expectations regarding such devices through a cross-sectional online survey of 506 adults in China. Respondents answered from either a prospective individual-user perspective ( n = 339) or a family caregiver perspective ( n = 167). Descriptive statistics, Top-2 Box summaries, and visual comparisons were used to analyze acceptance, scenario priorities, sensing preferences, data-sharing attitudes, and perceived device roles. Overall, respondents showed favorable but conditional acceptance. Privacy transparency, reliability, and recognition accuracy emerged as key adoption conditions, while concerns about emotional data misuse and machine accuracy remained salient. Participants prioritized home-based rehabilitation and health management scenarios, preferred wearable physiological sensing over camera-based monitoring, and favored human-in-the-loop interaction over fully automated responses. Family caregivers showed descriptively stronger endorsement than prospective individual users on several selected items, although the overall pattern was broadly consistent across groups and should not be interpreted as evidence of statistically significant subgroup differences. The findings suggest that emotion-recognition-enabled smart care devices may be more acceptable when designed around four principles: safety first, human-in-the-loop control, low-intrusion sensing, and bounded empathy. Because the sample consisted mainly of online adult respondents rather than actual older adult users, the findings should be interpreted as exploratory evidence on prospective acceptance rather than as direct evidence of real-world adoption.