Välkky’s voyage on to a hospital ward: Expectations, explorations and emergent robocentric nursing care

Abstract

Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in Finland, we report on the trial of a teleoperated care robot named Välkky introduced onto a fully operational hospital neurological ward. Our data revealed a narrative arc where participants’ early expectations of the hospital-based trial altered as the project unfolded. Greeted with techno-excitement and experimental enthusiasm about the place of robotics in reshaping roles within clinical care, Välkky became the focus for collaborative in situ learning, adaptation and redesign amongst the roboticists, designers, nurses, patients, and managers. Välkky acted as an ‘attractor’ provoking thinking about, and a reimagining of, future arrangements of care. Our empirically informed insights seek to pave the way for real-world nuanced thinking that pushes beyond human/non-human and success/failure binaries. Building on debates in STS and feminist posthumanism, we propose a robocentric approach, which encourages us to ‘queer’ health care robots, and to understand them as fluid, hybrid, distributed and relational figures, rather than purely as inert, mechanical, non-human objects that might replace humans. Nursing care practices by and with robots will generate new meanings and practices of care that will emerge iteratively, as caring relations, relationships and practices develop within the context of operational ward environments. Robots may or may not be able support care, but they will invariably challenge what care is.