Parental Attitudes, Trust, and Comfort with Using Robots for Providing Care to Children with Developmental Disabilities

Parents of children with developmental disabilities face significantly higher workloads than parents of neurotypical children due to their higher care giving demands. Consequently, parents of children with developmental disabilities often face emotional, physical, mental, and social health declines. Currently there has been significant research and development of robots for providing care to children with developmental disabilities to address a variety of care giving scenarios. However, it is presently unclear whether parents would be comfortable with robots interacting with their children in these different child-robot interaction scenarios. In this paper, we investigate parental comfort toward robots caring for children with developmental disabilities in a variety of interaction scenarios and the influence of parental negative attitudes toward robots as well as trust on their comfort toward robots in these scenarios. Overall, our findings suggest that US parental attitudes, trust, and comfort toward robots caring for children with developmental disabilities are neutral. Parents were most comfortable with a robot serving as a teaching assistant to children with a developmental disability and least comfortable as a bus driver. Furthermore, trust for robots had a medium positive association with comfort with child-robot interactions and negative attitudes toward robots had a medium negative association with comfort with child-robot interactions.