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Given the increasing challenges in today’s healthcare landscape, the role of health promotion and care delivery in home settings is gaining importance. Social robots have emerged as promising tools to support this shift, offering assistance, motivation, and companionship to patients and caregivers. However, their integration into home-based healthcare remains limited. To understand the underlying reasons, this study systematically reviews the literature, identifying the enablers and barriers to the deployment and use of social robots in home environments. Seven electronic databases (Medline, Embase, Web of Science, CINAHL, PsycINFO, Scopus, and Google Scholar) were searched in June 2023 and July 2024. After screening and eligibility assessment, 39 studies, involving actual human-robot interaction and conducted in real home environments, were included and appraised using the Mixed Methods Appraisal Tool. Data extracted from these studies were synthesized thematically. The results show that all studies were conducted in high-income countries, with most focusing on older adults and employing high-cost, anthropomorphic robots that were rarely co-designed with users. The findings suggest that the deployment and use of social robots are shaped by an interplay of the characteristics of interaction, context, robot, and user. They also point to a lack of holistic consideration of these characteristics, limited attention to ethical and legal aspects, and insufficient stakeholder inclusion in current design and implementation practices. To address these limitations, future research may benefit from ecological, participatory, speculative, and performative design approaches that support the development of more inclusive, adaptive, and ethical social robots for home-based healthcare.
Karaosmanoglu et al. (Wed,) studied this question.