Developing a New Brand of Culturally-Aware Personal Robots Based on Local Cultural Practices in the Danish Health Care System

Abstract

In earlier work it has been shown how culture can be used as a parameter influencing human robot interaction in general (e.g. [1]). While this is a good starting point, in our work with concrete application fields we encounter that culture in its usual definition as national culture (e.g. [2]; [3]) is too general a concept to be useful in these concrete applications. Thus, we shifted our focus instead to a concept of local cultural practices, which is derived from situated practices as in Wengers communities of practice [4] and grounded loosely in Sperbers idea of an epidemiology of representations [5], i.e. culture or rather cultural practices as an emergent phenomenon from learning processes in a given group. Developing this new kind of culture-aware robots can then not start from a general definition of culture like Hofstede [2], Schwartz and Sagiv [6], etc. but has to take the actual group of users (and stakeholders) into account. We exemplify this approach with our work in a residency for citizens with acquired brain damage.