With a rapidly aging baby boom generation comes great difficulties with regard to finances, labor shortages and the healthcare sector. We can see the trend of a growing number of elderly people throughout the whole first world. With a decreasing number of funds and skilled laborers available in the healthcare industry, the future has to rely more and more on technology. During the last few decades there has been an explosive rise in healthcare costs in industrialized countries.
The research assesses elderly people’s willingness to let technological systems become a part of their lives with regard to care. This is measured through Technology Acceptance Modelling, which was not originally a model that was designed for this sort of inquiry. However, with certain adjustments made at the end, it will be a better fit for the difficult question at hand. This newly-developed measuring method can be used in the future to develop care robots that better fit the profile of acceptance.
This, in turn, will have a vast amount of influence on future healthcare in terms of cost reduction. It will also influence the fact that these social robots should be able to do work that no person would ever be capable of doing.
University of Amsterdam
Windesheim Flevoland
