Max Robotics — Global Service Robot Directory + US Certification

About

Clara Iversen is a pioneering researcher at the intersection of social robotics, dementia care, and healthcare work environments. Her scholarship focuses on how robotic technologies — particularly robotic animals — reshape the experiences of both caregivers and residents in elder care settings, addressing one of the most pressing challenges of our aging societies. Iversen's most cited work, a 2021 scoping review on caregivers' experiences with robots (66 citations), established a critical foundation by redirecting scholarly attention from patient outcomes toward the often-overlooked perspectives of care workers. Building on this, she has developed an innovative research agenda examining triadic human-robot interactions, caregiver competencies, and the complex ethical terrain of robotic deception in dementia care. Particularly notable is her sustained engagement with questions of transparency and deception: if robot animals are designed to mimic living creatures, what obligations do caregivers have when vulnerable residents mistake them for real animals? Her work on "robotic misinformation" and emotional labor reveals how care workers navigate these moral dilemmas daily. By drawing on posthumanist theory, social gerontology, and ethnographic methods, Iversen has produced a uniquely multidisciplinary body of work that challenges researchers, ethicists, and policymakers to think more carefully about what it truly means to introduce robots into spaces of human vulnerability.