Healthcare 5.0 Technologies: A Socio-Technical Readiness Theoretical Framework for Service Robot Integration

The integration of service robots into healthcare has the potential to address workforce shortages, reduce burnout, and enhance patient care by automating repetitive and hazardous tasks. However, successful implementation requires a comprehensive understanding of the technical, human, and organizational readiness of healthcare institutions. This study develops a theoretical framework to guide future research toward the assessment of healthcare systems’ capability for service robot integration. Utilizing content analysis, this research examines key factors and their interrelations influencing readiness, including Technology Readiness Levels (TRLs), Human Readiness Levels (HRLs), and healthcare organizational readiness. The study employed a systematic literature review to identify manifest factors, text mining to identify additional latent factors, and thematic content analysis to examine relationships among manifest and latent factor themes. A combination of dictionary-based content analysis and Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) was applied to extract additional explicit and latent dimensions of healthcare service robot integration. Findings indicate that while technology maturity is advancing, gaps remain in human and organizational preparedness, emphasizing the need for structured implementation strategies. The theoretical framework provides the basis for future research toward a domain taxonomy and ontology of healthcare systems’ capability for service robot integration. The goal of this research is the development of a technology-human-organizational readiness assessment instrument of healthcare systems’ capability for service robot integration.