Yes / Service robots with advanced intelligence capabilities can potentially transform servicescapes. However, limited attention has been given to how consumers experiencing vulnerabilities, particularly those with disabilities, envisage the characteristics of robots’ prospective integration into emotionally intense servicescapes, such as long-term care (LTC). We take an interdisciplinary approach conducting three exploratory studies with consumers with disabilities involving Community Philosophy, LEGO® Serious Play®, and Design Thinking methods. Addressing a lack of consumer-centric research, we offer a three-fold contribution by 1) developing a conceptualization of consumer-conceived value of robots in LTC, which are envisaged as a supporting resource offering consumers opportunities to realize value; 2) empirically evidencing pathogenic vulnerabilities as a potential value-destruction factor to underscore the importance of integrating service robots research with a service inclusion paradigm; and 3) providing a theoretical extension and clarification of prior characterizations of robots’ empathetic and emotion-related AI capabilities. Consumers with disabilities conceive robots able to stimulate and regulate emotions by mimicking cognitive and behavioral empathy, but unable to express affective and moral empathy, which is central to care experience. While providing support for care practices, for the foreseeable future, service robots will not, in themselves, actualize the experience of “being cared for.” / This paper originates as a result of work on a project titled “Improving Inclusivity in Robotics Design” which received funding from “Research England, via The University of Sheffield’s Higher Education Innovation Fund (HEIF)" and in-kind funding from IBM.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:BRADFORD/oai:bradscholars.brad.ac.uk:10454/19120 |
| Date | 17 August 2022 |
| Creators | Kipnis, Eva, McLeay, F., Grimes, A., de Saille, S., Potter, S. |
| Source Sets | Bradford Scholars |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Article, Published version |
| Rights | © The Author(s) 2022. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/) which permits non-commercial use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed as specified on the SAGE and Open Access page (https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/open-access-at-sage)., CC-BY-NC |
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