Mundanely miraculous: the robot in healthcare

As both hero and villain, robots have played prominent roles in media such as films and books. Now, robots are no longer hidden away from the public conscious in fictive worlds or real-life factories. Robots are becoming a real part of our everyday encounters in environments such as healthcare settings. In this paper, we describe a discourse analysis of 60 YouTube videos that showcase robots in healthcare activities. Our narrative weaves three discourses that construct visions of the healthcare robot: (1) the miraculous robot as the robot that enhances patient care; (2) the mundane robot as the innocuous robot that integrates into the workflow seamlessly; and (3) the preternatural robot as the robot that is miraculous but never mundane. We propose several contrary visions to this dominant narrative of healthcare robots as a framework for future fieldwork that, we argue, should investigate the institutions of robotics.