Paving the Way for Culturally Competent Robots: a Position Paper

TL;DR

This paper advocates for developing culturally competent personal assistive robots by identifying key capabilities and proposing methodologies to enable robots to recognize and adapt to diverse cultural contexts, enhancing their effectiveness in healthcare settings.

Contribution

It introduces a framework for culturally competent robotics inspired by healthcare guidelines, outlining key capabilities and evaluation methods for such robots.

Findings

Identification of essential robot capabilities for cultural competence

Proposed methodologies for developing culturally aware behaviors

Discussion on evaluation strategies for cultural competence in robots

Abstract

Cultural competence is a well known requirement for an effective healthcare, widely investigated in the nursing literature. We claim that personal assistive robots should likewise be culturally competent, aware of general cultural characteristics and of the different forms they take in different individuals, and sensitive to cultural differences while perceiving, reasoning, and acting. Drawing inspiration from existing guidelines for culturally competent healthcare and the state-of-the-art in culturally competent robotics, we identify the key robot capabilities which enable culturally competent behaviours and discuss methodologies for their development and evaluation.