Situating and Disentangling Practices concerning Robots for Health Care in HRI: A Critical Scoping Review within the HRI Conference Works

Background: As the field of Human-Robot Interaction aims to develop and deploy robot applications for/in health care, it is important to disentangle research practices to understand who is (i) investigated, (ii) involved and (iii) how.

Objectives: The principal aim is to identify and synthesise how articles in HRI for/in health care generally include various stakeholders in their studies. The secondary aim, evolving directly from the initial aim, intends to shed a light on informal caregivers in contrast to healthcare professionals.

Method: Using a critical scoping review method, we systematically reviewed 52 articles related to health care published in the ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (2006-2023). We specifically report on (1) how the study is motivated, (2) who the study includes, (3) the methods used, and (4) how much informal caregivers and healthcare professionals are accounted for.

Results: From the 52 articles reviewed, 36 investigated care receivers, 20 investigated healthcare professionals and eight investigated informal caregivers. There is seemingly an exponential growth in HRI in health care studies. Using an alarming narrative to situate the study in opening paragraphs is commonly used, especially for care receivers and healthcare professionals. Care receivers were often investigated as a sole group, unlike other stakeholders. Healthcare professionals were often part of interview or focus group studies, whilst informal caregivers were often involved in workshops or laboratory studies. Finally, in 38 studies informal caregivers were either not mentioned or solely acknowledged, in contrast to 18 studies either not mentioning or acknowledging healthcare professionals.

Conclusion: This critical scoping review synthesises research practices. It has indicated the importance the HRI community gives to care receivers' feedback, as well as the inclusion of healthcare professionals' expertise to deploy robots in health care. The scoping review has also identified an important gap in the inclusion informal caregivers, we therefore offer five recommendations on how to include informal caregivers more.