# Expectation vs. Reality: Attitudes Towards a Socially Assistive Robot in Cardiac Rehabilitation
## 6 Conclusions and Future Work  
This work presented the assessment of the long-term perception and the attitudes that patients and clinicians had towards a socially assistive robot designed to support cardiac rehabilitation therapies. To achieve this goal, it was designed an experimental study for each group. In the case of patients, control (20 patients) and intervention (eight patients) conditions were evaluated, and for clinicians (15 persons), a focus group was performed with open discussion sessions, where opinions and comments where recorded. For both groups, participants were asked through a questionnaire, based on the modified UTAUT model presented by [PERSON] et al. (2018), about their perception regarding different categories of the robot. Results show that patients present a lower expectation of the robot usefulness, sociability, and safety before interacting with it, and this expectation, in most cases, is overcame after a considerable time of interaction with the robotic platform. With the realization of this study, it was possible to demonstrate that although there is a bias when people consider to use this kind of technology, after they have the opportunity to familiarize with the robot and interact during a suitable period of time, their perception and attitudes towards the robot became more positive. Within the experimental study regarding the clinician group, positive responses to robot's usefulness, trust, and safety were found. In the same way as patients, before the demonstration of the interface, clinicians had doubts regarding the robots' role in cardiac rehabilitation, expressing concerns about being replaced and the data reliability. However, after the demo and the experience with the robot, patients manifested to be more motivated and engaged during the exercises; and clinicians showed a great interest on the interface giving recommendations and possible improvements that could be developed in a next version. As was mentioned in the previous section, the social perception of the robot is not the desirable, patients (control and intervention), and clinicians, still have the same perception of the social cues of the robot. Therefore, the future work, that is proposed in this line, is the enhancement of the social model of interaction, aiming to provide a more natural interaction. For this purpose, it is meant to develop a personalized robot that is able to recognize each patient, monitoring their performance along the sessions and tracking the development of the complete rehabilitation phase. With this development, it is expected to increase the social abilities, and therefore the engagement of the users during the therapy. [PERSON] developed the cardiac interface and the UTAUT questionnaires. [PERSON] performed the questionnaires and the focus groups at the clinic. [PERSON] and [PERSON] led the manuscript writing. [PERSON] and [PERSON] reviewed the questionnaires and manage the experimental protocol. [PERSON] developed the experimental protocol and performed the statistics analysis for the data obtained. [PERSON] proposed and supervised the structure of the paper. [PERSON] and [PERSON] were involved in the revising and correcting the manuscript. This work was supported in part by the Royal Academy of Engineering IAPP project Human-Robot Interaction Strategies for Rehabilitation based on Socially Assistive Robotics (grant IAPP\(\backslash\)1516\(\backslash\)137), and Colciencias (grant 813-2017). This work was carried out in collaboration with the Fundacion Cardioinfantil-Instituto De Cardiologia, where the experiments and protocols were performed. The authors acknowledge the work of [PERSON] for her support on the development of the focus group carried out with the clinicians. The authors declare no conflicts of interest. The following abbreviations are used in this manuscript: