Cultural competence is a well known requirement for an effective healthcare, widely investigated in the nursing literature. We claim that personal assistive robots should likewise be culturally competent, aware of general cultural characteristics and of the different forms they take in different individuals, and sensitive to cultural differences while perceiving, reasoning, and acting. Drawing inspiration from existing guidelines for culturally competent healthcare and the state-of-the-art in culturally competent robotics, we identify the key robot capabilities which enable culturally competent behaviours and discuss methodologies for their development and evaluation.
Barbara Bruno, Nak Young Chong, Hiroko Kamide, Sanjeev Kanoria, Jaeryoung Lee, Yuto Lim, Amit Kumar Pandey, Chris Papadopoulos, Irena Papadopoulos, Federico Pecora, Alessandro Saffiotti, Antonio Sgorbissa. Paving the Way for Culturally Competent Robots: a Position Paper, RO-MAN2017, IEEE International Symposium on Robot and Human Interactive Communication, Lisbon, Portugal, 28-31 August 2017
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