Tech-savvy healthcare consumer? There’s a robot doctor in your future

There’s probably a lot of overlap between computer “power users” and individuals who are comfortable with machines replacing humans in the workplace.

Either way, both those traits are predictors of a person’s willingness to entrust his or her healthcare to automated doctors, nurses and receptionists.

Researchers at Penn State found as much after recruiting study participants from Amazon’s Mechanical Turk online staffing system.

The team queried the volunteers on their attitudes toward and beliefs about machines’ competency—aka their “machine heuristic”—then had them interact with humans, avatars and robots representing healthcare workers.