This comprehensive review article, “Towards a Sociology of Healthcare Robots,” published in Sociology of Health & Illness in 2025 by Daniel Robins, Nik Brown, Karl Atkin, Luna Dolezal, and Sarah Nettleton, presents a novel sociological framework for understanding the integration and impact of healthcare robots. The authors’ primary aim is to shed light on the heterogeneous ethics of mutual labour and the complex definitions of care that emerge directly from the design and deployment of these robotic technologies in healthcare settings.
The article is the culmination of a narrative literature review that specifically examined assistive robots used in various care contexts. While research on healthcare robots has been robust in fields such as geography, legal studies, and philosophy, redefining the concept of care within these disciplines, the authors found a notable gap in sociological inquiry. To address this, their review explored how existing research conceptualizes healthcare robots, identified current gaps, and proposed ways sociologists could engage with this literature. The search terms for their review included “biopolitics,” “robotics,” “robotics + healthcare,” and “phenomenology” across diverse academic journals, emphasizing the interdisciplinary nature of robotics.
The proposed sociological approach contributes significantly to three core fields, offering fresh perspectives on how human-nonhuman rationalities of care are being re-examined as categories of human and machine increasingly entangle:
- Phenomenology of Healthcare Robots:
- The article deepens understandings of sensory engagement with machines, particularly through the concept of “affective technotouch”. This term highlights the human body’s vulnerability, porousness, and emotionality in embodied encounters with robots, suggesting that touch no longer serves as a strict dividing line between human and nonhuman.
- “Soft robotics,” with their fleshy and material dissimilarity to traditional hard metal robots, are shown to invite more affective interactions, potentially lowering pain perceptions and increasing comfort. This allows for a new investigation into the futures of touching in care settings.
- Techno-touch is also explored as part of an “irreducible interconnectedness” in care, such as in dementia care, where touch is both physical and a metaphor for emotion, bringing human and machine into conjunction and grounding their shared vulnerability.
- The concept of “recognition” in patient-robot interactions is rooted in the robot’s “double body” – a hybrid form exhibiting human features (like a smile or blinking eyes) while remaining distinctly robotic (plastic casings, grippers). This design encourages patients, particularly in elderly residential homes, to attribute biography and lifelikeness to robots like Zora, blurring the lines between living beings and machines.
- However, the article also addresses the “eeriness” that can accompany robot interactions, especially when facial manipulations don’t align with bodily movements. This unease can be reduced when robots display emotions, facilitating empathy, though age can mediate these feelings, with older children, for instance, experiencing unease related to the robot’s perceived mental capacities.
- Ultimately, the article suggests that as robots become more complex, the distinction between human and nonhuman agency may become meaningless, with meaningful emotional connections forming through the human attribution of agency and “affective arrangements”.
- The Biopolitics of Healthcare Robots:
- The authors argue that traditional interpretations of Foucault’s (2008) biopolitics often understate nonhuman agency and technology’s governance over life.
- To better capture the “biopolitical entanglements of the biological and the artificial,” the paper introduces “techno-biopolitics” (Lipp and Maasen 2022). This concept views life as manufactured through human-technology interconnections, where “interfacing” makes biological life and technology compatible, decentering life from being purely biological.
- This framework extends to how robots enable the “capillaries of discipline” through behavioural modifications, echoing Zuboff’s (2019) “surveillance capitalism”. Healthcare robots’ ability to collect new forms of patient data translates into commercial value, turning data into a commodity used for surveillance and trade in patient care. This “datafication” and “commodification” of the patient body raise significant ethical questions regarding consent and privacy in a “digitised care” system.
- The concept of “infopower” (Koopman 2019) is used to explain how individuals are “formatted” by the categories used to gather their data and “fastened” into new data-driven institutional structures. This process can recreate a patient’s status and experience, creating a tension between care and surveillance where their role is remade by the data collected about them. This also highlights the potential for the neoliberalisation and commodification of health services on a global scale.
- Reconfiguration of Healthcare Labour:
- The article challenges anthropocentric notions of care by emphasizing that healthcare robots, like humans, are “unfinished and contingent,” requiring human care and maintenance. This leads to a conception of “mutual labour,” where robots both maintain and are maintained by humans, compensating for labor shortages and alleviating health risks for staff.
- While robots can perform practical tasks like house cleaning, fall prevention, and health monitoring, patient and staff skepticism remains concerning their ability to perform emotional work. The paper highlights how cultural meanings influence the acceptance of robots, using the example of lifting robots in Japanese care, where the task’s cultural significance can lead to resistance despite practical benefits.
- Ethical considerations are paramount, particularly regarding privacy with telepresence robots, where patient choice must be central to their deployment in residential care. Certain forms of labour, such as assistance with showering, are deemed too delicate for robots, with older adults preferring human assistance for private personal care.
- The review also addresses the racialized and gendered aspects of robot design. The “sanitised” white aesthetic of healthcare robots, while practical for medical settings, risks being perceived as replacing a racially diverse care workforce and reinforces the default body as white, exacerbating existing biases in AI diagnostics. Furthermore, the “smart wife” phenomenon, seen in feminized AI assistants like Alexa or Siri, perpetuates outdated gender stereotypes about women’s roles in the home.
- Beyond direct care, the article broadens the scope of labour to include the global assemblage of robot production, such as manufacturing in the Global South, and the environmental implications of robotics, linking repair and care within the context of the climate crisis.
- The concept of “emotional maintenance” is introduced as a component of mutual labour, where the human attribution of emotions to robots and the robots’ performance of actions embodying these connections are part of an ongoing, unfinished development of care work.
In conclusion, Robins et al. (2025) call for sociologists of health and illness to move beyond viewing healthcare robots solely as hardware. Instead, they advocate for understanding robots as both physical bodies and complex arrays of algorithms that profoundly impact care rationalities and patient experiences. This requires examining the politics of embodied data relations and the organizational consequences for care, particularly the inherent tension between care and surveillance. The increased implementation of robotics provides a crucial opportunity for sociology to rethink the boundaries of ‘human’ alongside new healthcare technologies.
Reference: Robins, D., Brown, N., Atkin, K., Dolezal, L., & Nettleton, S. (2025). Towards a Sociology of Healthcare Robots. Sociology of Health & Illness.