Determinants of the intention to use e-Health by community dwelling older people

Abstract

BackgroundIn the future, an increasing number of elderly people will be asked to accept care delivered through the Internet. For example, health-care professionals can provide treatment or support via telecare. But do elderly people intend to use such so-called e-Health applications? The objective of this study is to gain insight into the intention of older people, i.e. the elderly of the future, to use e-Health applications. Using elements of the Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology (UTAUT), we hypothesized that their intention is related to the belief that e-Health will help (performance expectancy), the perceived ease of use (effort expectancy), the beliefs of important others (social influence), and the self-efficacy concerning Internet usage.MethodsA pre-structured questionnaire was completed by 1014 people aged between 57 and 77 (response 67%). The hypothesized relationships were tested using nested linear regression analyses.ResultsIf offered an e-Health application in the future, 63.1% of the respondents would definitely or probably use it. In general, people with a lower level of education had less intention of using e-Health. The majority of respondents perceived e-Health as easy to use (60.8%) and easy to learn (68.4%), items that constitute the scale for effort expectancy. Items in the performance expectancy scale generally scored lower: 45.8% perceived e-Health as useful and 38.2% perceived it as a pleasant way to interact. The tested model showed that expected performance and effort were highly related to intention to use e-Health. In addition, self-efficacy was related to intention to use while social influence was not.ConclusionsAcceptance of e-Health can be increased by informing people about the potential benefits of e-Health and letting them practice with the application. Special attention should be paid to people with less education and people who have not used the Internet before.Electronic supplementary materialThe online version of this article (doi:10.1186/s12913-015-0765-8) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

Telemonitoring for Seniors with Chronic Heart Failure: Patient Self-Care, Empowerment, and Adoption Factors

“…The social influence of people close to them was positive and their intention to use the system was high, with supportive facilitating conditions. These are in line with the findings by de Veer et al [37] who assessed the determinants of intention to use e-Health by older people and found that the majority perceived e-health easy to use and learn. Interestingly, similar to their findings, the patients in this study reported lower levels of performance expectancy (i.e.…”

“…To our knowledge, only one study has used elements of UTAUT to gain insight into the intention of older adults to use e-health solutions [37]. Analysis of surveys of 1014 respondents (57-77 years) showed that expected performance and effort were highly related to intention to use e-health.…”

Seniors’ attitude to e-health

“…As the most recent study by de Veer et al (2015) confirms, two thirds of community-dwelling older people are open-minded towards the use of eHealth application. They can see its benefits such as improved access to health care services and potential cost cuts (cf.…”

User-Centered Adaptation of an Existing Heart Failure Telemonitoring Program to Ensure Sustainability and Scalability: Qualitative Study (Preprint)

“…From a usability perspective, there is a clear preference among patients, both in the literature [24,31,32] and in our study, for using Bluetooth-enabled peripheral devices. However, what appears most important is that patients can access TM services using devices they are most familiar with (ie, personal smartphones and tablets) [33][34][35] and that the perceived advantages of a TM program are greater than any usability inconveniences caused by manually entering biometric data [36][37][38]. To our knowledge, ours is the first study to confirm that BYOD is perceived by both clinician and patient users as a viable option for delivering TM services with a caveat that considerations are required to ensure universal accessibility.…”