ABSTRACT
Mobile chronic disease management systems (MCDMS) have become increasingly important in recent years, but in China, challenges remain for their adoption. Existing empirical studies have not completely explored the adoption behavior of potential MCDMS users. This article presents a study in which we investigated factors that influence chronically ill patients in China and their families to adopt or decline to use MCDMS. We applied a research model based on the technology acceptance model (TAM) as well as four contextual constructs (perceived disease threat, perceived risk, initial trust, and technology anxiety) to a survey of 279 potential MCDMS service participants in China. Our key findings include: (1) as consistent with current research, both perceived usefulness and perceived ease of use have positive impact on potential users’ MCDMS adoption intention; (2) both perceived disease threat and initial trust have positive impact on MCDMS adoption intention; (3) the impact of perceived risk is negative, and technology anxiety has negative impact on perceived ease of use of MCDMS; (4) young people place more importance on their perceptions of usefulness, ease of operation, and disease threat than middle-aged and older users; (5) family members are more influenced by their perception of ease of use and disease threat than chronically ill patients, while chronically ill patients place more importance on perceived usefulness than family members. This article concludes by discussing the implications of our study for research and practice, as well as limitations and future research directions.
Funding
This work was funded in part by the “Mobile Health” Ministry of Education - China Mobile Joint Laboratory, the Mobile E-business Collaborative Innovation Center of Hunan Province, and the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant Numbers 71210003, 71271219).
Ethics Statement
We certify that we have complied with the ethical guidelines of Committee of Publications Ethics regarding research with human participants and/or care and use of animals in the conduct of the research presented in this article. In addition, we appreciate the academic committee in the “Mobile Health” Ministry of Education - China Mobile Joint Laboratory which reviewed the project proposal and gave us the ethical approval.