Abstract: Objective To explore the willingness of the elderly in the community to use accompanying robot. Methods With purposive sampling, 20 elderly people in one community in Changsha were selected for semi-structured interview from June to July 2021. Grounded theory was used to conduct open coding, main axis coding, and open coding of interview data with NVivo12plus software. Selective coding and theoretical saturation test were applied to extract the themes of the elderly's willingness to use accompanying robot. Results Thirty-two concepts and ten first-level categories were formed and three themes were extracted: perceived technical support (insufficient technology-task adaptation, low degree of anthropomorphism, and appearance-preference imbalance), perceptual behavior control (weak perception of technical usefulness, weak perception of technical ease of use, low accessibility, and no purchasing power) and perceived value (high functional value expectation, high technical value expectation, and high emotional value expectation). Conclusion The willingness to use accompanying robot is directly affected by external factors of perceived technical support and perceptual behavior control and indirectly by internal factor of perceived value. Both internal and external factors work jointly to enhance the willingness of the elderly to use accompanying robot, which is helpful to promote the development of robot-assisted pension model.

Key words: accompanying robot, intelligence care for the elderly, the elderly, willingness to use, qualitative research