The Robot in the Room

Abstract

Nursing work is complex, as nurses strive to deliver care in a dynamic environment that is both strictly regulated and continually demands improvisation. As demands on this healthcare profession grow in tandem with worker shortages, the need for solutions, such as robotics, is an ever-growing desire. However, it remains difficult to develop robotic systems that integrate into nursing practice. This provocation challenges the prevailing methodologies that tend to adopt a technocentric focus on robotic systems for nursing, treating robots as isolated entities rather than situated and relational ones. We propose that performative approaches to developing robotic systems, i.e., approaches that understand experiences and interactions to emerge from people's situated encounters with robotic artefacts, are critical to create robotic systems that can integrate into nursing practice. In this paper, we also elaborate on our planned study in which we intend to use Augmented Reality (AR) to stage situated encounters between nurses and a mimed assistive robot through speculative enactments. This work provokes a rethinking of how robotics can move beyond rigid control systems that provide predefined functions for nurses to robots as improvisation tools that nurses can use creatively. We argue that by inviting nurses in performative, real ward environments, we can find synergy between a robot's physical constraints and people's creative appropriation that is set within the complex reality of nursing work.