An empirical study of adopting mobile healthcare service: the family's perspective on the healthcare needs of their elderly members

Abstract

In an aging society, the issue of increased medical costs troubles both government agencies and families with aging parents. Many elderly people require long-term care, and the medical and financial problems associated with long-term care worry their entire family. Mobile healthcare service (MHS) has been widely applied by medical practitioners and researchers for years. Unfortunately, the elderly often fear both the technology and the cost its use incurs; hence, they seldom actively adopt MHS without the prompting and support of other family members. This study highlights this issue of long-term healthcare for the elderly and extracts the factors affecting their family's intentions in adopting MHS. Based on the integration of the Theory of Planned Behavior and the Technology Acceptance Model, the factors associated with the family's intention of the aging people toward MHS are explored. Data were collected from 200 students in the "Job Master" track in a local "Executive Master of Business Administration" program. Half of them had at least one immediate family member who was older than 65 years of age. A partial least squares (PLS) analysis shows that "attitude" significantly affected the behavioral intention of adopting MHS, and "perceived usefulness" and "perceived ease-of-use" had an indirect effect via "attitude." The PLS model explains the variance in intention (64.1%), attitude (58.1%), and perceived usefulness (33.8%). Overall, this study shows that attitude was an important determinant of MHS adoption. Gender also significantly affected the relationship between attitude and behavioral intention to adopt MHS.