Do Europeans trust robot-assisted surgery?

“Trust is an important variable in health-related decision-making,” the authors of a new study write, “especially when it entails high risk and uncertainty.” The authors conducted research regarding whether people in the European Union would feel comfortable “about having a medical operation performed on them by a robot [led by artificial intelligence (AI)].”

They write that their comprehensive study, which involved asking questions  to 27,901 citizens aged 15 years and over in the 28 countries of the European Union “takes an integrated approach, considering drivers and barriers such as socioeconomic and cultural environments, sociodemographic factors, and psychographic indicators.”

« We aim to provide new evidence from the social perspective, from patients and citizens, since at some point they could be asked to undergo surgery involving the use of robots, » explains Professor Joan Torrent Sellens, from the Open University of Catalonia’s (UOC) Faculty of Economics and Business, lead researcher of the University’s i2TIC group and the co-author of this study, together with UOC professors Ana Jimenez Zarco and Francesc Saigi Rubio.

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