Wearable health technology has become increasingly prevalent in recent years, revolutionizing the way we monitor our personal well-being and especially among vulnerable sectors of the population. A study in the International Journal of Business Information Systems has carried out a systematic mapping of the literature to see how other researchers undertake work investigating the perception and acceptance of these innovative healthcare tools. The work offers invaluable insights into how such studies might be improved to gain more information and to preclude biases.
Gustavo Lopes Dominguete, Marluce Rodrigues Pereira, and Andre Pimenta Freire of the Federal University of Lavras in Brazil, analysed the vast corpus of research in this field from sources including Scopus, Web of Science, and PubMed. Their goal was to understand the methods used to evaluate the acceptance of wearable health systems and to pinpoint the key factors influencing how those studies are done and to highlight how they might be improved to better understand the results.
They pooled almost 400 research papers and then homed in on the most pertinent twenty. What they saw was a clear picture of the methods commonly used to gauge user perspectives on wearable health systems: the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) and the System Usability Scale (SUS). These tools are usually used to analyse data from questionnaires and have proven effective. The research seemed to focus on two particular areas of wearable use: fall detection and physical activity monitoring among older people.
The widespread availability of smart bands and smartwatches has made these functions accessible to a broad user base and so research into their use has come to predominate, the team reports. As such, the research literature commonly looks at the ‘perceived usefulness and perceived ease of use of such devices. While it is important to understand how these two factors affect user acceptance, that does mean that other factors are less well investigated but might just as easily have importance.
The researchers suggest that future studies ought to consider other factors and the broader context of the use of wearables for these and other applications. For instance, the work they analysed did not generally pay much attention to considerations such as hygiene, aesthetics, or privacy risks. The dearth of information on the influence of such factors suggests that new investigations need more detailed questionnaires and larger user samples across more diverse demographics, age groups, and cultural and social contexts. Qualitative studies that took such variables into account could provide a more detailed picture of user perception of user healthcare wearables and so help guide research and technology in that area to the benefit of users and their caregivers.
Dominguete, G.L., Pereira, M.R. and Freire, A.P. (2023) ‘Acceptance of wearable health technologies: a mapping of the state of the art’, Int. J. Business Information Systems, Vol. 44, No. 1, pp.137–159.
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