1. Introduction

Ageing globally is occurring rapidly, placing severe pressure on elderly care and long term health care systems. By 2050 the population will be older than 60 percent of them, overwhelming healthcare facilities and conventional care models. However, assistance and emotional support to patients has emerged from social robots.

We hypothesize that social robots when situated in-between human-human interactions and digital care interfaces, may engage on multiple layers such as companionship (affect expression), routine tasks (service) and health conditions monitoring. Cyberabbey's innovation can make the possibility of an automated elder care a reality, recent research has already showed how these robots could actually transform caring for elderly people allowing them to stay independent longer and reducing strain from human caregivers. Kyrarini et al. In terms of social robots deployed in elderly care facilities, facilitating daily tasks and providing reminders as well as cognitive stimulation [1].

At the same time, despite rapid increase in application scenarios for social robots there are significant hurdles to widespread dissemination. These range from technical constraints like the robots — and their limited capability to deal with complex emotional or medical situations — right through to ethical issues stemmingfrom bulk patient data collection. Additionally, some ethical concerns (e.g., robotic caregivers leading to dehumanization of care, societal resistance for the use by healthcare social robots) make wider deployability tough. This paper aims to investigate and understand the nature of these challenges, unravel their implications and propose suitable solutions that can help in addressing them paving the path for further integration of social robots within healthcare settings.

2. Applications of Social Robots in Healthcare

The use of social robots for health care has been emerging rapidly and the primary use has been with elderly care, rehabilitation and chronic diseases. One among the several socially interactive robots, Pepper, a humanoid robot, is currently popular in the elderly care homes). As a speech recognition social robot, Pepper can interact with elderly patients and ease their loneliness as a result of old age. This platform makes Pepper act based on the facial expressions and general tone of voice of the patients to ensure they do not develop any worsening mental state.

Furthermore, social robots are gradually being used in hospitals for operational purposes to relieve human personnel in noble tasks such as administration. According to Silvera-Tawil [2] robots are applied in virtually all the caregiving sectors including the delivery of medicines and movement of health-related commodities making it easier to manage operations in hospitals. Such robots are then intended to do cyclic duties that may otherwise consume human healthcare providers’ time, enabling them to handle core functions for patients.

In addition to utilizing social robots for logistic aid, robots are also proving quite useful for psychological support services. Padhan et al. [3] explain that current care robots are also being employed to address patients with chronic diseases or dementia in long-term care facilities. Such robots can help with cognitive activities, remind patients when to take their medications and when to do some simple tasks and hence boost patient compliance with recommendations and recommendations and can also enrich the lives of their patients. In chronic illness, specifically, robotic systems assist in the evaluation of such parameters as blood pressure and glucose level, where robotic recommendations of a doctor’s involvement may be necessary.

Rehabilitation settings are also experiencing traction with social robots. Now, they serve as interactive tools used for patients recovering from surgeries or injuries to show them what are physical exercises they must go through in physical therapy. Among other things, the robots provide feedback on the accuracy and efficacy of movements, so that patients might improve their outcomes. Moreover, the ability of these robots to monitor continuously to track a patient’s progress over time provides a good source for physiotherapists.

3. Advantages of Social Robots in Healthcare

The advantages that social robots offer are distinct from roboticists as social robots are able to deliver several different types of benefits and in areas that require an additional resource scarcity such as healthcare delivery. They possess one of their big advantages because they can provide round the clock monitoring and care without needing the breaks or shift changes. Continuous attention is usually required in the area of elderly care and of chronic disease management, and this is especially important. However, robots can be programmed to do routine tasks, such as checking vital signs, prompting patients to take medication, or helping patients perform physical exercises. This capability significantly decreases the burden on human caregivers for performing more critical medical tasks, and increases the potential for continued and error free performance

Robots can be programmed to perform routine tasks such as checking vital signs, administering reminders for medication, and assisting patients with physical exercises. Their capacity for consistent and error-free performance significantly reduces the burden on human caregivers, allowing healthcare workers to focus on more critical medical tasks. In addition, within healthcare settings, the precision of social robots is also of importance, whereas each accurate action and measurement would add to reliable, real time data collection. They help deliver early diagnosis, but also ensure a high quality of care – because that consistency means there’s always a check of the sign. Social robots can provide real and detailed evidence of precise and consistent health indicator’s capture so healthcare professionals can detect early potential health issues and adopt proactive intervention strategies.

Social robots improve patient engagement through interaction. People in care facilities often are very lonely and socially isolated, and when they are they can become depressed. Researchers who studied robots that included Pepper and Nao robots demonstrate that they decrease loneliness by conversing with patients, playing games with them and providing cognitive stimulation. Not only does it uplift emotional well-being for patients, it also tend to scale down the risk of depression and cognitive decline.

Moreover, social robots could serve to support in therapeutic areas. For instance, robots can help patients get through physical therapy exercises with guidance while receiving real time feedback on their movement. Hence, healthcare providers could utilise social robots to continuously monitor patients' progress for personalised service and develop more effective rehabilitation plans over time.

4. Challenges and Issues

Although social robots are increasingly used in the healthcare, they are also beset with varied challenges both technical and ethical in their adoption. A big stumbling block for technology involves the robots’ emotional interactions with patients. Being able to recognise and (to a certain extent) process and respond to complex emotional cues, however, remains limited, according to Boada et al. [4] and for good reason. Human emotion is also a varied and often complex thing, with many contributing factors, culture, personality, and situation for example. Though with advanced AI algorithms, robots struggle to understand the full complexity of human emotions, their emotional response is typically inadequate or inappropriate.

The use of robots in healthcare may also come across ethical issues. Stahl and Coeckelbergh [7] claim care robots solve the ethical dilemma of using robots in caregiving based not only on privacy considerations but also on doubts about the quality-of-care robots can furnish. Robots can do a task at a very high rate, but they lack that empathy, that emotional intelligence that human caregivers do. It should make people wonder if those patients that are relying on robots to take care of them really get the same type of emotional support and human connection that they would otherwise get from a human caregiver. One of the major challenges involved is also data privacy and security. To work properly, social robots require collecting an enormous amount of data from patients, interactions with which they will then attempt to respond. It is not only health metrics, it also includes behavioral and emotional information. According to Elendu et al. [5], these data may be hackable, resorted to unauthorized access, or misused, if they are not properly protected. In healthcare, we have special privacy concerns, and potential breaches could be extremely serious. Healthcare facilities often do not have infrastructure to implement strong encryption methods and to properly store patient information securely.

Another major barrier for the widespread usage of social robots in healthcare is cultural acceptance. Kaluvakuri [6] makes the interesting point that the social attitude to robots it very different from culture to culture. There is, however, considerable skepticism in many regions, and especially among western societies, about the idea that robots will take positions historically owned by human caregivers. Often, this skepticism is based on whether the robots are capable of offering adequate and authentic emotional care, or to dehumanize the caregiving service experience. Furthermore, robots might deprivate jobs in the healthcare sector away from human caregivers, even replacing them.

For as equality and accountability become more pressing questions for accountability of robots in healthcare, reliance on robots in healthcare itself increases. When a robot fails to detect a health issue or provides incorrect advice, the issue of liability arises: this is turning into a mess, who is responsible? The question here is complicated because it’s about not only the hackers, it is also about manufacturers of the robots and the healthcare institutions that employ them. The specific ethical and accountability challenges that exists even in providing social robots in caregiving settings cannot be fully addressed by current legal frameworks and they do not mature enough to incorporate all the issues. In practice, this means that there are large legal gaps regarding the use of robots in healthcare and without a strong legal base, wholesale implementation is difficult. In order for social robots to effectively be integrated into the healthcare environment, comprehensive legal standards are vital for precisely defining responsibilities, accountability and protection of patients.

5. Solutions

Several solutions have been proposed to address the challenges faced by social robots in healthcare, focusing on three main areas: technological advancements, ethical and legal frameworks, and societal acceptance.

The main area where the social robot is improved is the emotional recognition abilities. Robots can better interpret and respond to patients’ emotional needs, through advanced artificial intelligence and machine learning algorithms. By refining the methods to analyze and understand patient’s speech, tone, and sentiment, robots can be able to respond with more empathetic and more personalized support. This entails making use of natural language processing to find out the subtle emotional cues in patient communication for improving overall communication and so the patients can feel emotionally supported.

Regarding privacy protection, healthcare institutions are obligated to adopt stricter data security measures. Encrypted patient data collected by robots, restricted access to the sensitive information, these are two important lines of defense to tackle the unauthorized access as well as preserving patient data confidentiality. There should also be regular audits on data protection practices, for preventing diverting legally protected data. Data security is being proposed as a solution to tackle this problem, with blockchain technology being suggested through decentralized, tamper proof storage systems that keep the data safe from being modified or breached by unauthorised personnel.

Just as addressing ethical concerns requires a rethinking of the nature of these roles, addressing ethical concerns related to caregivers also requires rethinking the roles that robots play in caregiving. Instead, robots should be seen as the extension of capabilities allowed for by the human, and not with their deployment as a replacement for the care given by the human. This assistant model allows robots to perform repetitive tasks like medication reminders and mobility assisstance, with human caregivers staying in the loop for the human element of care (e.g., emotional and social support needed for maintaining wellbeing), according to Stahl and Coeckelbergh. This approach, in addition, obviates anxieties about the dehumanization of care and safeguards the human component of caregiving.

From liability point of view, legal frameworks should be clearly drawn in order to hold someone accountable. When robots fail to produce sufficient care or error in any way, manufacturers or health care providers must be held accountable. To do this, governments and regulatory bodies will require the development of detailed criteria that are established to provide guidelines for deployment of robots to the health care realm, and that all parties involved with implementation, installation, and operation of the robots are aware of their consequences of these actions. But such frameworks not only make it clear who is accountable, they also shield patients and caregivers from harm that can stem from errors in robot operation.

In order for social robots to see widespread adoption, public education and acceptance have to be increased. Ma et al. propose that educating all the public on the advantages of social robots in healthcare and organizing awareness campaigns, would help to solve the problem of displacement of jobs and dehumanization of care by social robots. Being able to demonstrate that robots will support human caregivers, rather than replace them, may contribute to eliminate opposing attitudes against robotics and paint a positive picture in the healthcare system.

As well, social robots should be designed to be culturally adaptive to caregiving practices and values of unique populations. Perhaps it’d involve teaching robots with regional languages, customs, and elaborate types of culturally appropriate caregiving protocols to function unobtrusively and comfortably in any medical facility throughout the world.

The current limitations of these systems are such that constant research and development in its field are needed. Interdisciplinary research that advances on the development of safer, more sophisticated, and ethically sound robotic systems, that satisfy the requirements of both patients and of caregivers, needs to be nurtured through investments. Pilot programs can be expanded to test social robots in different healthcare settings that can offer the researchers valuable insights about the effectiveness on these technologies and allow him to refine and adapt the technology to the real world application.

6. Conclusion

Social robots show potential in elderly care and chronic disease management by offering emotional support, tracking health, and assisting with daily tasks. These robots are particularly valuable in elderly care, addressing isolation and the need for continuous health monitoring. However, challenges hinder wider adoption. Technological limitations restrict robots from providing empathetic care like human caregivers, as their abilities in emotional recognition and decision-making remain limited. Privacy and data security concerns also arise due to the vast amounts of personal health data collected, which must be safeguarded to prevent breaches. Cultural resistance to robotic caregiving reflects discomfort with replacing human roles, raising ethical issues around care dehumanization and accountability.

Proposed solutions include advancements in AI and emotional recognition, strict privacy regulations, and public education to improve acceptance. Ethical concerns could be addressed by positioning robots as complementary tools to human caregivers, enhancing care quality rather than replacing humans. Additionally, legal frameworks are needed to ensure patient safety and protect healthcare providers from liabilities.

In the future, social robots may play a larger role in healthcare than just elderly care and chronic disease management; they would serve in rehabilitation, mental health, and public health initiatives. Social robots have the potential to evolve to become indispensable tools of healthcare landscape with new emergent practices that are research, development and regulated in a thoughtful manner to face the problems of aging population and rising healthcare load.