Biblio

Throughout the last few decades, a breakthrough took place in the field of autonomous robotics. They have been introduced to perform dangerous, dirty, difficult, and dull tasks, to serve the community. They have been also used to address health-care related tasks, such as enhancing the surgical skills of the surgeons and enabling surgeries in remote areas. This may help to perform operations in remote areas efficiently and in timely manner, with or without human intervention. One of the main advantages is that robots are not affected with human-related problems such as: fatigue or momentary lapses of attention. Thus, they can perform repeated and tedious operations. In this paper, we propose a framework to establish trust in autonomous medical robots based on mutual understanding and transparency in decision making.

In medical human-robot interactions, trust plays an important role since for patients there may be more at stake than during other kinds of encounters with robots. In the current study, we address issues of trust in the interaction with a prototype of a therapeutic robot, the Universal RoboTrainer, in which the therapist records patient-specific tasks for the patient by means of kinesthetic guidance of the patients arm, which is connected to the robot. We carried out a user study with twelve pairs of participants who collaborate on recording a training program on the robot. We examine a) the degree with which participants identify the situation as uncomfortable or distressing, b) participants' own strategies to mitigate that stress, c) the degree to which the robot is held responsible for the problems occurring and the amount of agency ascribed to it, and d) when usability issues arise, what effect these have on participants' trust. We find signs of distress mostly in contexts with usability issues, as well as many verbal and kinesthetic mitigation strategies intuitively employed by the participants. Recommendations for robots to increase users' trust in kinesthetic interactions include the timely production of verbal cues that continuously confirm that everything is alright as well as increased contingency in the presentation of strategies for recovering from usability issues arising.

A recent study featuring a new kind of care robot indicated that participants expect a robot's ethical decision-making to be transparent to develop trust, even though the same type of `inspection of thoughts' isn't expected of a human carer. At first glance, this might suggest that robot transparency mechanisms are required for users to develop trust in robot-made ethical decisions. But the participants were found to desire transparency only when they didn't know the specifics of a human-robot social interaction. Humans trust others without observing their thoughts, which implies other means of determining trustworthiness. The study reported here suggests that the method is social interaction and observation, signifying that trust is a social construct. Moreover, that `social determinants of trust' are the transparent elements. This socially determined behaviour draws on notions of virtue ethics. If a caregiver (nurse or robot) consistently provides good, ethical care, then patients can trust that caregiver to do so often. The same social determinants may apply to care robots and thus it ought to be possible to trust them without the ability to see their thoughts. This study suggests why transparency mechanisms may not be effective in helping to develop trust in care robot ethical decision-making. It suggests that roboticists need to build sociable elements into care robots to help patients to develop patient trust in the care robot's ethical decision-making.

With the recent advances in computing, artificial intelligence (AI) is quickly becoming a key component in the future of advanced applications. In one application in particular, AI has played a major role - that of revolutionizing traditional healthcare assistance. Using embodied interactive agents, or interactive robots, in healthcare scenarios has emerged as an innovative way to interact with patients. As an essential factor for interpersonal interaction, trust plays a crucial role in establishing and maintaining a patient-agent relationship. In this paper, we discuss a study related to healthcare in which we examine aspects of trust between humans and interactive robots during a therapy intervention in which the agent provides corrective feedback. A total of twenty participants were randomly assigned to receive corrective feedback from either a robotic agent or a human agent. Survey results indicate trust in a therapy intervention coupled with a robotic agent is comparable to that of trust in an intervention coupled with a human agent. Results also show a trend that the agent condition has a medium-sized effect on trust. In addition, we found that participants in the robot therapist condition are 3.5 times likely to have trust involved in their decision than the participants in the human therapist condition. These results indicate that the deployment of interactive robot agents in healthcare scenarios has the potential to maintain quality of health for future generations.

Trust is an important topic in medical human-robot interaction, since patients may be more fragile than other groups of people. This paper investigates the issue of users' trust when interacting with a rehabilitation robot. In the study, we investigate participants' heart rate and perception of safety in a scenario when their arm is led by the rehabilitation robot in two types of exercises at three different velocities. The participants' heart rate are measured during each exercise and the participants are asked how safe they feel after each exercise. The results showed that velocity and type of exercise has no significant influence on the participants' heart rate, but they do have significant influence on how safe they feel. We found that increasing velocity and longer exercises negatively influence participants' perception of safety.

Robots that interact with children are becoming more common in places such as child care and hospital environments. While such robots may mistakenly provide nonsensical information, or have mechanical malfunctions, we know little of how these robot errors are perceived by children, and how they impact trust. This is particularly important when robots provide children with information or instructions, such as in education or health care. Drawing inspiration from established psychology literature investigating how children trust entities who teach or provide them with information (informants), we designed and conducted an experiment to examine how robot errors affect how young children (3-5 years old) trust robots. Our results suggest that children utilize their understanding of people to develop their perceptions of robots, and use this to determine how to interact with robots. Specifically, we found that children developed their trust model of a robot based on the robot's previous errors, similar to how they would for a person. We however failed to replicate other prior findings with robots. Our results provide insight into how children as young as 3 years old might perceive robot errors and develop trust.