Sharing a life with Harvey: Exploring the acceptance of and relationship-building with a social robot

Social robots will become ubiquitous in our everyday environments. These robots could potentially extend life expectancy, and improve the health and quality of life of an aging population. A long-term explorative study has been conducted by installing a social robot for health promotion in elderly people’s own homes. Content analysis of interviews provided an in-depth understanding of the factors that influence the acceptance of and relationship-building with social robots in domestic environments. The permanent presence of a robot in users’ own homes yields the vital challenges social robots encounter to be successfully accepted by their users. These vital acceptance challenges are unlikely to be revealed in one-day laboratory human-robot interaction studies or even in multiple observations of short interactions between humans and robots.