Empirical evidence on usability of mobiles in healthcare

Abstract

Healthcare industry today has seen a lot of innovation and transformation like any other industry. With technological advancements it is growing leaps and bounds. One of the major challenges before the world today is effective management of diseases. The healthcare industry has been benefitted with the usage of information and communication technology (ICT). When integrated properly this technology has the potential to provide solutions to increased demands in quality, efficiency and improved workflow to help streamline healthcare operations. newlineDeveloping countries today are facing an increasing incidence of non communicable and communicable disease. M-health has the potential to extend help in both the fronts. Peep into various scenarios reveal that majority of diseases that kill people in the rural areas are curable with little information and this information dissemination can happen through mobiles which have a deeper penetration than any other technology. Most of the innovations in mobile technologies have not been evaluated beyond the pilot stage. Thus there is a need newlineto evaluate these interventions for them to become acceptable and usable by the patients and healthcare professionals. Various researchers time and again have argued the need for usability studies in healthcare innovations. This study is unique as it caters to both the aspects: technology acceptance and health technology acceptance and the context of usability. There is a large pool of studies which are available for technology acceptance but for healthcare context there has to be a mix of technology acceptance behavior and health behavior newlineacceptance. Researchers like Nutbeam (1998) have highlighted the importance of health behavior which is defined as activities which individuals take up irrespective of their health status for the objective of health maintenance even if such behavior may not be effective in the end. newline