Donald Berwick, former president of the Institute for Healthcare Improvement who also served as acting administrator of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) during the Obama administration, indicated in a webinar on value-based care sponsored by the Duke Margolis Center for Health Policy on June 10, 2021 that “the reliance on hospitals is one of the biggest mistakes in design we have -- home is the hub. Anything the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation (CMMI) can do to advance the shift of the center of care to home and community is good.” Assuming that a widespread transformation of that nature is on the horizon, there will be significant impacts on the workforce needed to provide health and health-related social services. A related aspect is the extent to which technology will play a role in efforts to address the requirements of patients with multiple chronic ailments. The U.S. population not only is experiencing a growth in the number of individuals aged 65 and older, but many of them also will live alone and will require various forms of assistance if an aim is to enable them to continue to exist independently.
One element in the technological armamentarium is the employment of robots as assistive devices. The entire May 2021 issue of the journal Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking was devoted to this topic. A rationale for doing so is that pandemic living has blurred the boundary between what is “real” and what is “virtual,” merging the computer-generated and the physical in a tightly woven web. Although research about technology development during this pandemic is only just now becoming available, an observable truth is that COVID-19 has increased a reliance on technology, and that likely includes robots. While in 2018, global sales of consumer robots totaled an estimated $5.6 billion, the market is expected to more than triple to $19 billion by the end of 2025 because robotics are perceived as going from a nascent industry to a more robust presence in furnishing patient care. A major objective is to manufacture social robots able to engage with humans and to provoke an emotional connection so that interactions between the two will feel much more like a relationship with a “someone” rather than a “something.”
A common belief is that robots eventually will become sophisticated enough that they will be indistinguishable from humans, but this assumption begets two questions. First, is existing theorizing about interpersonal, human-human relationships applicable to studying human–robot relationships? Secondly, given the present state of knowledge, should human-robot interaction designers’ goal be to mimic them? Among the topics discussed in this journal issue is the notion of peer pressure on human risk-taking behavior. The results of one investigation show both possible benefits and perils that robots might pose to human decision-making. Although increasing risk-taking behavior in some cases has obvious advantages, it also could have detrimental consequences that only now are beginning to emerge. An example of a possible negative outcome is whether robots could increase risky behaviors such as smoking and substance abuse. Clearly, any possible happenings of that nature should be avoided vigorously.