hello everyone I'm Matt beam and this
paper is in storage
yet on display an empirical
investigation of robots value as social
signals I had a bit of a puzzle with
this one which was that at one of my
field research sites there was a
significant investment in robotic
telepresence technology that failed to
deliver instrumental results
I'm calling this psych Carell I'm
obscuring a fair amount of identifying
detail here yeah it seemed to generate
significant business value and value for
customers and employees and we have
limited knowledge as to why those kinds
of dynamics might persist and what are
the consequence of them so that was the
research question for this study how and
why microbots add value beyond
instrumental results the way I approach
this is through signalling theory which
comes mostly out of economics amount of
organization theory which basically
suggests that we make costly investments
or commitments that suggest underlying
quality when it's hard to show that
directly in order to elicit favorable
interpretation and action from those
with access to preferred resources a
bank puts up marble to show financial
largesse and stability to attract
customers we put things on our CV to
show about our capability and so on that
helped explain my data here's a few
citations for related theory to get into
the data at this field site Correll
hospital was a 387 bed teaching hospital
in the northeastern US a fair number of
surgical staff and physicians and so on
and had several satellite locations as
well as referral relationships with lots
of other smaller hospitals in 2007 a new
CEO arrived and he leased twelve RPC
seven units for six years
RP seven is the unit you can see off to
the right this is a telepresence robot
allows for a variety of two-way audio
and video communication and mobility and
the primary use case for this system was
remote stroke diagnosis neurologists are
generally retained by larger hospitals
only but you need a neurologist on-site
to assess the risk of a certain kind of
stroke placing one of these units in a
remote hospital allowed for that
that was a potentially very valuable use
case the way I got my data was that I
was on site at Corel for 14 months just
about every week gathering observational
data of variety of kinds I also
interviewed a variety of staff and
recorded and transcribed those
interviews asked them retrospective
questions as well as questions about
current day and I use standard
techniques for analyzing this data first
categorizing it in sort of low-level
abstractions things like lack of use or
outside our attention and relating those
via signalling theory to try to expand
or explain this puzzle to build a theory
that accounted for those dynamics that
abstracted away from the contexts to a
middling degree so that it could be used
to explain a predict behavior with in
context with similar characteristics so
here on to the findings the limited
value I was speaking of here's the
telemedicine program director speaking
about this directly we were hoping in
2007 that the robot would be a big
differentiator now it's just gathering
dust the economic crisis happened more
importantly and that was in 2008 more
importantly the neurologists concluded
that they would be liable for
misdiagnosis in new and unknown ways if
they use this system across state lines
so they refused to use it the
telemedicine program director placed one
of these units in the Caribbean three of
rural hospitals five at Carol's own
facility not at all the intent of the
intended use three went into storage but
ultimately all of them did and so there
was very limited revenue from the
initial case and only slightly more from
the other here is literally what I
walked into in storage closets not
specially designed for these systems
they were not powered up sitting unused
and more and more of these went into
closets over time in fact they literally
did have dust gathering on them as a
telemedicine program director suggested
and this one was in a post surgical ICU
a place that's supposed to be very clean
so however the organization and
individuals extracted significant value
from this system so this is again that
same individual saying someone at the
tries
city tribune reached out shortly after
we implemented and they sent out a
videographer to interview the medical
director and see this robot in action
and it became a front-page story right
out of the gate we got huge bang for the
buck this signaling value for the
organization was manifest through news
stories web pages controlled
demonstrations and what I'll describe in
a moment highlighting and hiding
practices on the ground and this in
these contributed to outcomes such as
facilitated business development
fundraising brand awareness employee and
customer satisfaction so to get into
some concrete data highlighting
practices here's a nurse saying I had a
patient that was alert and oriented and
doing fantastic and she was like what is
that and I explained it to her and she
was like super impressed and I think
that just kind of leaves corral like a
check in the good column like wow they
have the technology here that I would
think that they would have in major city
so I thought that was really kind of
cool that we have this really advanced
technology nurse and patient both
satisfied that interaction the hiding
practices were important for signaling -
this is the telemedicine program
director they hospital administrators
felt like out of sight out of mind and I
was told get him out of the hospital
because they sat plugged in in public
spaces and weren't being used for the
longest time people knew we were
spending a lot of money on those things
people were asking for FTEs full-time
employees and we're getting shot down
for this and that and they were saying
you have money for that damn thing and
you can't give me a raise the hell with
you so they were like get them the hell
out of here so now I've got them in a
closet it's terrible now to back away
from the data I account for in the final
model in the paper
the instrumental value the sensible
failed story from the context
characteristics through deployment
pattern patterns in the middle of this
model that I'll fill in in a moment -
the realized value and the same for
signaling so context is key here and
defines the balance - generalizability
there's a competitive context we're
sending a signal that shows technical
sophistication really mattered it
mattered for your ability to compete in
that
in terms of deployment however the key
user group refused to use it and
essentially you could you had a fraud
implementation where value was quite low
or limited so you didn't get the
benefits of that initial use case and
you have limited exploration of
additional use cases over time however
on the signaling side the organization
and individuals engaged in focused
promotion news stories web pages digital
and print documents those demonstrations
and those practices I described all of
which facilitated significant and
positive outcomes for the organization
in for workers and customers a key twist
to note is that the hiding practice that
I described actually made it harder to
explore new use cases for two reasons
one the robots were physically moved
into closets powered down and not used
but people forgot that they were there
and how to use them so the ability of
the organization to extract new
instrumental value went down as a result
of those hiding practices the
limitations of the study have to do with
the context as I've described it's very
important that it's difficult to for
outsiders to surveil the use and
practical utility of the technology in
question in this case robots were very
good for signalling because you could
put them in the closet and still get
signalling value by saying that you had
them however it's important to note I
think we can conclude that as
interpretation matters more for outcomes
signaling value will be higher the
incentives to signal will be stronger as
it relates to robots and in particular
we know from work on novelty effects and
HR I and elsewhere that the signaling
values should be higher when technology
is new and rare there's a few
implications if we take the base finding
from the study into account that we will
interact with robots to signal resource
worthiness and that can have unexpected
effects for study design we can
interrogate our study design the
contexts to see what ik to what extent
there are resources symmetries or
observability issues and multi-party
systems all of these could be compounds
to something else we're trying to study
and for designing our systems
their appearance is how they behave and
what their base functionality is all may
be relevant to or activate these
signalling dynamics and we can take
those into account as well again to just
improve the robustness of our findings
or as I did here we can study signaling
directly it's a new area of potential
inquiry for h RI h RI researchers i
thank you very much i'm sorry we
couldn't all gather together i'm very
grateful for the opportunity to share
this research thanks