TSES-R: An Extended Scale for Measuring Parental Expectations toward Robots for Children in Healthcare

Abstract

There is a growing interest in implementing robotics applications for children in healthcare to provide companionship, comfort, education, and therapy. Parental expectations regarding robotics for young children play a critical role in influencing its development and acceptance. However, parental expectations are widely overlooked in HRI. Therefore, a better understanding of what parents of young children expect the robot to do in health-related interactions with robots is needed. To achieve this, we adopted the Technology-Specific Expectation Scale (TSES) [2] and added three more dimensions (i.e., assistive role, social-emotional, and playful distraction) to gauge usersf expectations of robots in healthcare, resulting in TSES-R. This paper reports the development and reliability analysis of TSES-R. Furthermore, this paper presents the preliminary results collected from using the TSES-R with a sample of 31 families, which showcases how these outcomes could be helpful for future related studies.