Abstract

Fear and skepticism are inherent in the acceptance of any avant-garde AI technology. Robot-assisted surgery can be conducted with critical precision for patients. Despite its long history, robot-assisted surgery is still a new technology to most who are reluctant to embrace it. Prior literature indicates the frustration of nurses and other medical assistants towards robot-assisted surgery due to a lack of clarity with their roles, parents’ perception of pediatric robot-assisted surgery, and its impact on decision-making during operations. As such, we note that basic emotions such as skepticism and fear can be extended to all the involved parties, surgeons, medical assistants, and patients. There is a lack of comprehensive studies investigating factors that cause fear of robot-assisted surgery. In order to promote the wide-scale adoption of robotic surgeries for critical orthopedic or neurological surgeries, it is important to explore and analyze the factors of robotic surgery that cause fear and the reason behind it. In order to gauge the factors that influence fear and skepticism in robot-assisted surgeries, we intend to conduct both qualitative and quantitative studies with different scenarios across hospitals in the United States. The study will include the perspectives of both the patients and the medical team. We plan to develop a research model based on existing literature and empirically evaluate hypotheses with collected data. Survey questionnaires and semi-structured interviews will be conducted to collect data in order to better understand the concerns and inconsistencies in peoples’ perceptions of robot-assisted surgery. Our questionnaires will include measures to assess the perceived level of capabilities (e.g., risks, performance) of the surgery robot, operational difficulty, and level of surgeon’s capability, and willingness to receive a medical operation. Manipulating the levels of risk and operation difficulty, we plan to develop four scenarios that will be randomly assigned to participants. With this study, we attempt to address the following research questions: 1) What are the factors affecting willingness to receive a medical operation in the context of robot-assisted surgery? and 2) What are the roles of individuals’ perceptions (e.g., fear, risk) in receiving a medical operation assisted by robots? Our study aims to contribute to extant research on artificial intelligence by filling the research gap in the understanding the roles of human emotions such as fear in the medical field. This study can provide a novel view of fear in adopting and using robot-assisted surgeries in the healthcare industry. In addition, we can find how personal characteristics such as responsibility play their roles in the context of robot-assisted surgeries.

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