The Development And Test Of Patients' Acceptance Model Towards Smartphone Health Technology For Chronic Disease Management

The use of smartphone technology can enable frequent and flexible personal interaction between patients and health care providers at the right time and right place.With the rapid development of smartphone technology,there are also a rapid increase of smartphone technology applications and studies in chronic disease management.However,literatures show that smartphone health technologies have encountered various challenges in patient acceptance.For the successful introduction into the routine health care delivery system,it is essential to understand the factors affecting chronic patients,acceptance of the smartphone health technology.The general technology acceptance study is a process that includes the development and validation of a theoretical acceptance model.In the context of chronic disease and smartphone technology,a hybrid theoretical model is built based on the technology acceptance model,dual-factor model,health belief model,and the factors identified from interviews that might influence patients' acceptance of smartphone health technology for chronic disease management.The content is as follows:(1)Research the develop methods of technology acceptance model through a solid theoretical review.The related models of acceptance study are firstly compared and summarized,and the effectiveness of these theories has been proved by adequate studies' results.However,a single model cannot able to fully explain the technology acceptance without consideration of the specialization of field and technology.At the same time,it is controversial to use the user's usage intention to characterize technology the acceptance.Therefore,it is necessary to use multiple theories to develop the research model by capturing the specialization of mobile health.Also,an exploration of the relationship between intention to use and actual usage is valuable to provide evidence of the measure of users' acceptance.(2)Develop the chronic disease patients' acceptance model towards smartphone health technology.Firstly,the technology acceptance model,dual-factor model and health belief model are merged to propose 8 constructs,11 hypothesis.Then,the "actual use" and "the effectiveness of chronic management" are added to the model.Lastly,the construct "relationship with doctor"is generated by patients' interview.Based on above sequential steps,a hybrid acceptance model that concludes 12 constructs,18 hypothesis is finally proposed.(3)Validate the patients' acceptance model towards smartphone health technology.The entire validation process includes data collection,model validation and result analysis.Data are collected from patient questionnaire surveys and computer log records about 157 hypertensive patients' actual use of a hypertension management smartphone application,and the research model was tested by the partial least squares(PLS)path modeling.With accounting for 41.2%of the variance in patients' intention to adopt the smartphone health technology,the results show that the hybrid research model perform better explanation than any other single model(TAM,Dual-factor Model and HBM account for 32.8%,38.7%and 25.6%,respectively).This paper develop and test a theoretical model to predict patients' acceptance of smartphone health technology for chronic disease management.There are four important conclusions:1)Perceived ease of use has no significant effect on patients' intention to use smartphone health technology;2)Relationship with doctor and perceived health threat play an important in patients'acceptance of smartphone technology;3)intention to use has a significant,weak relationship with actual use;4)There is a positive relationship between actual use and the chronic disease management.Lastly,for the successful introduction of smartphone health technology innovation for chronic disease management,efforts need to be focused on improving patient-doctor relationship and providing continuous patient education to raise awareness of the disease's threat to health.