When People Can't Rely on a Robot, They Quietly Do It Themselves
■ Nothing is broken. It just isn't called
Checking the records, Shiraishi finds almost no delivery requests for Hakobukun in the past few days. On the ward, Terashima is heading to the pharmacy herself: "It was late twice, so going myself is more reliable." Hakobukun sits on its charging dock. "No one is calling me."
■ When people can't rely on it, they go back to the old way
In a study of delivery robots at a Danish hospital (Tornbjerg et al.), 8 of 16 kitchen staff felt they could not rely on the robots and did the robots' tasks themselves. A robot can fall out of use without a single complaint or fault report.
■ Conclusion: Keep watching how often it is used
Shiraishi put the number of requests next to the number of trips people made themselves, fixed the cause of the two delays, and showed Terashima. "If it's fixed, I'll try asking again."
Count "not broken" and "relied on" separately.
