Patient perspectives on robotic versus manual total hip arthroplasty: A nationwide social media sentiment analysis from 2015 to 2024

As robotic-assisted surgery grows in popularity, including for total hip arthroplasty (THA), patient perceptions of robotic versus manual techniques have not been extensively studied. This research aimed to compare patient perspectives on robotic and manual THA by analyzing comments from social media platforms and health forums. A total of 885 comments from self-reported patients were collected from Instagram, Facebook, X (formerly Twitter), Quora, Reddit, and WebMD between 2015 and 2024. Of these, 211 comments referenced robotic THA and 674 mentioned manual THA. Sentiment analysis was conducted using VADER, a natural language processing tool known for handling nuanced language, including sarcasm and social media-specific text. Word clouds and thematic analysis were generated to visualize common themes. The most frequently discussed themes for robotic surgery included surgical experience (50%), pain management (43%), and physical therapy (30%). For manual surgery, pain management (43%), surgical experience (35%), and physical therapy (25%) were the most common themes. Sentiment analysis showed predominantly positive scores for robotic surgery, peaking between 0.25 and 0.50, while manual surgery scores were more neutral, peaking at 0–0.25. Permutation testing with comprehensive weighting confirmed a statistically significant difference favoring robotic surgery ( p ​= ​0.0000), and bootstrap resampling demonstrated robustness of the findings with a mean difference of 0.3837. Social media and forum comments suggest that robotic THA results in more positive patient feedback compared with manual THA, with significant differences in sentiment and thematic content. Importantly, while statistically significant, these sentiment differences may not always translate to clinically meaningful disparities.