Acceptance Evaluation of a COVID-19 Home Health Service Delivery Relational Agent

ABSTRACT

Relational Agents (RAs) may be helpful in supporting the social distancing mandate during the COVID-19 pandemic by providing essential health services to patients at home and eliminating the need for in-person hospital visits. We conceptualized and developed a prototypical RA to visualize how this can be done in four major COVID-19 related health scenarios. In this paper, we present acceptance evaluation of the proposed RA using a survey based approach. A total of 105 participants were asked to interact with and analyze the prototype. Participants then indicated perceived usefulness and willingness to accept and use the proposed RA on Likert scales. The findings show that overall 80.77% of participants found the suggested RA useful. 59.67% of participants accepted it as an alternative to healthcare professionals as long as the scenario is not life-threatening. Furthermore, 78.29% of the participants indicated that they would be willing to use the proposed RA, if needed. Further research is needed to understand what factors can improve the uptake of the proposed RA among individuals ≤ 30 years and with no COVID-19 infection history. © 2022, ICST Institute for Computer Sciences, Social Informatics and Telecommunications Engineering.