Introduction

According to the scientific, technical and media literature, there is a continuous and significant increase in the narrative about the importance of robots in the economy and society (Belanche et al, 2020; Rommetveit, van Dijk and Gunnarsdottir, 2020). Originally, robots were produced to cover the needs of industry, being regarded as a substitute for human beings and for doing the ‘three Ds’ of labour: dirty, dangerous and demeaning. In industry, robots are supposed to improve the quality of work by taking over tasks that are very hard or not safe for humans to perform (Royakkers and van Est, 2015; Valles-Peris and Domenech, 2020a). Thus, most of the known industrial scenarios do not need to take into consideration how to manage the interaction between humans and robots; once the robot is placed, the human being is thought to disappear.

Nevertheless, the idea that robots can cover other human needs than those related to industry has also gained ground and new concerns and debates are taking place. Roboticists refer to this innovative landscape as ‘New Robotics’ (Schaal, 2007). Together with a set of technical developments, New Robotics contains a narrative aligned with the unstoppable and exponential development of robots, as well as a certain technological determinism that foresees a future of robots as the best solution to our problems (Maibaum et al, 2021; Rommetveit, van Dijk and Gunnarsdottir, 2020). Inevitably, this narrative implies that robots will appear in environments that would have seemed unexpected not long ago, assuming duties traditionally and exclusively assigned to humans. In this vein, we are witnessing an increasing expectation of advances in robotics in different domains, among them in the field of healthcare.

The possibility of involving robots in caring tasks seems closer than ever. There have been pilot experiences with robots and older people, robots working in therapy for children with autism and robots in hospitals enrolled in a variety of tasks. The response to the emergency situation provoked by COVID-19 has increased the use of robots, intensifying the growing tendency of recent years. After public safety, the clinical care domain has the largest set of uses of robots, due to robots’ potentiality to be used to reduce physical contact between people (Kritikos, 2020).