Patients´ Behavioral Intentions toward Using WSN Based Smart Home Healthcare Systems: An Empirical Investigation

Advances in Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) have opened up new opportunities for healthcare systems. WSN based smart home healthcare systems (WSN-SHHS) represent innovations in the area of sensor technology that have promised to improve healthcare quality and to stem rising healthcare costs by facilitating effective patient-medical professional collaboration and smart information sharing, and increasing patients´ health observability and remote monitoring. Most previous research on WSN-SHHS has focused on algorithm development and technical improvement. However, limited research has explored the factors influencing patients´ adoption of WSN-SHHS, which are of equal importance for successful implementation of WSN-SHHS. To fill the knowledge gap, we contextualized UTAUT to the domain of WSN-SHHS. The model was tested using survey questionnaire. The empirical results confirm that performance expectancy, social influence, life quality expectancy, and cost expectancy have direct effects and effort expectancy has indirect effects on patients´ behavioral intention to use WSN-SHHS. Several practical and theoretical implications of the research findings are discussed.