Beedholm Kirsten, Frederiksen Kirsten, Frederiksen Anne-Marie Skovsgaard, Lomborg Kirsten
Department of Public Health, Section for Nursing, Aarhus University, Aarhus, Denmark.
Department of Clinical Medicine, Aarhus University Hospital, Faculty of Health Sciences, Aarhus University, Aarhus, Denmark.
Nurs Health Sci. 2015 Sep;17(3):280-6. doi: 10.1111/nhs.12184. Epub 2015 Feb 5.
In Western countries, assistive technology is implemented on a large scale in elder care settings. Only a few studies have attempted to explore the different attitudes to assistive technology among various groups of users. In this study, we investigated and explained the different attitudes among the involved leaders, nursing staff, and older people to a newly-implemented robot bathtub. Qualitative analyses of eight interviews with managers, nursing staff, and the older users revealed that the informants focused on different aspects (process, values, and functionality, respectively), used different implicit quality criteria, and ascribed different symbolic significance to the robot bathtub. Thus, the study demonstrated how attitudes toward the robot bathtub were connected to the informants' institutional role. The findings challenge the current paradigm, where technology is expected to operate as a passive tool, simply facilitating desired human acts and interactions. Further studies drawing on the epistemological and ontological perceptions of science technology studies are needed in order to understand human rationalities in the assistive technology context and to offer new insights into how technology "works" in organizations.
在西方国家，辅助技术在老年护理机构中得到了大规模应用。仅有少数研究试图探讨不同用户群体对辅助技术的不同态度。在本研究中，我们调查并解释了参与其中的领导、护理人员和老年人对新安装的机器人浴缸的不同态度。对管理人员、护理人员和老年用户进行的八次访谈的定性分析表明，受访者分别关注不同方面（过程、价值和功能），使用不同的隐含质量标准，并赋予机器人浴缸不同的象征意义。因此，该研究展示了对机器人浴缸的态度如何与受访者的机构角色相关联。这些发现对当前的范式提出了挑战，在当前范式中，技术被期望作为一种被动工具运行，仅仅促进期望的人类行为和互动。为了理解辅助技术背景下的人类理性，并为技术在组织中“如何发挥作用”提供新的见解，需要基于科学技术研究的认识论和本体论观念进行进一步研究。
