# Healthcare Students' Ethical Considerations of Care Robots in The Netherlands
## 1 Introduction
Treatment should be tailored to the individual and education, training, and technology continuously updated, improved, and tested. Justice refers to fairness with equal rights for everyone to the best treatment: medicine, expertise, and other resources are equally distributed among all. This principle demands to address potential conflicts of treatment with current law, legislation, rights, liabilities, and other obligations. Our first research question (RQ1), then, is: To what extent do higher and lower vocational care students believe that assistive, monitoring, and companion robots affect a patient's autonomy, may do harm, or be beneficial, and \"just\"? Conversely, is it that care students fear that robots \"take over\" a patient's decision making, hurt them physically, companion robots do not help against loneliness, and denying human empathy to patients is unfair [21; 22]? Another concern of care students might be that robots take their jobs [23]. Do students perceive robots as complementary or are robots considered so capable that robots will replace them? _Utility_ of a robot, in our case, relates to how handy and practical care students think a robot would be during job performance [24]. _Acceptance_ would be the actual agreement to and adoption of robot technology in the work practice, for instance, based on utility and ease of use [25]. About a decade ago, the general tendency among healthcare students was that robots would replace them and that employing robots in care was unacceptable [26]. [PERSON] [27] and [PERSON] [28] found that care students were pessimistic about the usefulness of robots in telemedicine. In nursing older adults, the workforce did not believe robots to be useful [29]. Would this position have changed over the past years? What is known is that, if people do not expect too much of the performance of a technology, the behavioural intention to actually use the system is weak [30]. Likewise, if perceived usefulness and perceived ease of use are low, intentions to use new technology drop [25]. The reverse seems also valid: Intention to use and actual use increase if people feel that a device will perform well, is useful, and easy (ibid.). Hence, if care professionals see that a robot is practical and functional, would their initial moral objections become less of an issue [31] or will they co-exist? Our RQ2, then, is: To what extent do care students believe that assistive, monitoring, and companion robots are acceptable and that robots will be useful in their future occupations? Furthermore, RQ3 asks: Does high perceived usefulness perhaps downplay earlier ethical concerns? To investigate ethical and occupational concerns of care students with different types of care robots, we designed a questionnaire study, probing the contrast between principles of ethics and considerations of utility and acceptance. In other words, the current study seeks to investigate how care professionals' moral concerns relate to different types of care robots, whether these differ among the higher and lower educated professionals, how care professionals perceive a care robot's usefulness, and how their moral concerns relate to perceived utility and acceptability.