Sharing a life with Harvey: Exploring the acceptance of and relationship-building with a social robot

•We installed a social robot in elderly people’s homes for three 10-day visits.•Content analysis of interviews provided in-depth evaluations of user experiences.•Elderly people are willing to engage in social interactions with robots.•Familiarity with robots raise evaluations on usefulness, intelligence and sociability.•Hedonic factors seem to be most important for long-term acceptance of social robots. Social robots will become ubiquitous in our everyday environments. These robots could potentially extend life expectancy, and improve the health and quality of life of an aging population. A long-term explorative study has been conducted by installing a social robot for health promotion in elderly people’s own homes. Content analysis of interviews provided an in-depth understanding of the factors that influence the acceptance of and relationship-building with social robots in domestic environments. The permanent presence of a robot in users’ own homes yields the vital challenges social robots encounter to be successfully accepted by their users. These vital acceptance challenges are unlikely to be revealed in one-day laboratory human-robot interaction studies or even in multiple observations of short interactions between humans and robots.