Liaison, safeguard, and well-being: Analyzing the role of social robots during the COVID-19 pandemic

doi:10.1016/j.techsoc.2022.101993

Technology in Society

Volume 70, August 2022, 101993

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.techsoc.2022.101993 Get rights and content

Under a Creative Commons license

open access

Highlights

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We examined social robots' deployments in real scenarios during the COVID-19 pandemic.
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Two-hundred forty deployments involving 86 different robots were analyzed.
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Social robots perform three main roles: liaison, safeguard, and well-being coaches.
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The largest number of deployments was identified in hospitals.

Abstract

We examine the implementation of social robots in real-world settings during the COVID-19 pandemic. In particular, we analyze the areas in which social robots are being adopted, the roles and tasks being fulfilled, and the robot models being implemented. For this, we traced back and analyzed 240 deployment cases with 86 different social robots worldwide that have been adopted since the coronavirus outbreak. We found that social robot adoption during this period was strongly related to the use of this technology for crisis management. The social robots’ capacity to perform the roles of liaison to minimize direct contact among humans, safeguard to ensure contagion risk-free environments, and well-being coach to protect mental and physical health, is key to explaining adoption within this context. The results of the study offer a complete overview of social robots’ utilization in real life settings during the pandemic.

Keywords

Social robots

COVID-19 pandemic

Robot deployment

Healthcare

Cited by (0)

Dr. Aymerich-Franch is a Ramón y Cajal senior research fellow at Pompeu Fabra University. She was recently a visiting scholar at the MIT Media Lab – Personal Robots Group, Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Previously, she was a Marie Curie fellow (European Commission) at the Experimental Virtual Environments for Neuroscience and Technology, Barcelona University, and at the CNRS-AIST Joint Robotics Laboratory, National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology. Before that, she was a Fulbright postdoctoral scholar at the Virtual Human Interaction Lab, Stanford University. She has a PhD cum laude on Audiovisual Communication from the Autonomous University of Barcelona.

Dr. Ferrer is a postdoctoral research fellow at Pompeu Fabra University and a visiting professor at the Autonomous University of Barcelona. She is a Social Communicator and Journalist specialized in media management and production (Universidad del Norte) and holds a Ph.D. cum laude in Audiovisual Communication (Autonomous University of Barcelona). She has been a visiting scholar at the Center for the Study of Latino Media and Markets (Texas State University) and at the Research Center in Communication and Information (Institute of Technology and Higher Studies, Mexico), and a postdoctoral scholar at the Autonomous University of Barcelona.