A Future With Healthcare-Robots And WelfareTechnologies? : A Bachelor Thesis About Attitudes Regarding RobotsAs Assistance Within Health And Social Care

This thesis deals with attitudes regarding robots, specifically those seen within health and social care. The purpose of this paper is to look into and analyze as to why the implementation of robotics as a complement to health and social care moves at a slow pace in Sweden, compared to Japan - which we believe is due to skepticism and a presumed social aversion in Sweden. In the beginning of writing this paper, we suspected that the media had played a part in affecting the opinions of the public, which we later could confirm in interviews done by us, and by doing a Google search analysis. However, we were disproved that Japan is as far ahead of Sweden as we first thought. We came to realize that Sweden has a goal of becoming the world’s leading country in welfare technology and digitalization by 2025, which the media has failed to report about, and so it is something that has gone unnoticed. By asking three research questions we’re looking to compare Sweden to Japan in terms of attitudes towards and the development of robotics, specifically robots directed towards health and social care. The questions are as follows: (1) How does the opinions between caregivers differ from developers and other people working with welfare technology? (2) What is the skepticism, as well as the acceptance based on, regarding robots? (3) How does the search results differ in the search engine Google when googling the term “robot” in Swedish and Japanese? Our research showed that there is a lack of information and communication by politicians and developers of robotics pointed towards the public and specifically caregivers, who are left out of the conversation to do research on their own - which leads them to find Swedish websites and articles about robotics that, in comparison to Japanese websites and articles, puts the robots in a negative light. Finally, we suggest some sort of normalization process regarding robots, for example by downplaying the scare tactics by the media, and letting the public see the robots for what they really are - something to serve as a complement in health and social care, and not as a threat that could replace you. We believe that fairs and educational talks open to the public would be helpful, so that they can “meet and greet” the robot. This might help the public warm up to the idea of welfare robotics, which in turn may bring forward societal changes.