E-health and wellbeing monitoring using smart healthcare devices: An empirical investigation

Abstract According to the United Nations Sustainable Development Goal No. 3 (SDG – Goal 3), for sustainable development it is imperative to ensure health and well-being across all ages, and is achievable only through effective and continuous healthcare monitoring. But in India and other third world countries, healthcare monitoring is poor compared to other countries in the world, in spite of it being affordable. The global healthcare smart wearable healthcare (SWH) devices market is expected to rise up at a CAGR (Compound Annual Growth Rate) of 5.6% and by 2020 it is expected to reach 25 Billion (GVR Report, 2016). The growing incidences of lifestyle diseases, sedentary lifestyle, busy work schedules, technological advancements in healthcare monitoring devices, and increased usage of remote devicesseems to be some of the important factors fuelling this growth. Some of the major players in this segment are Abbott Laboratories, Philips Healthcare, Life Watch, GE Healthcare, Omron Healthcare, Siemens Healthcare and Honeywell International Inc. etc. But in spite of the healthcare monitoring devices are being predicted to be technologically innovative and providing advanced as well as basic health care monitoring features and available in various price ranges based on the features, we wanted to empirically study the attitude towards adoption of such devices in India. India has traditionally been having a very lackadaisical attitude towards healthcare monitoring. In such a context, what would be the factors influencing the adoption of SWH devices. Remote health monitoring can enhance the nature of wellbeing administration and to lessen the aggregate expense in human services by maintaining a strategic distance from pointless hospitalizations and guaranteeing that the individuals who need critical consideration get it sooner. This empirical investigation would provide a detailed insight as to how these wearable Internet Of Things devices would bring about a revolution in the healthcare industry. It would also provide the future prospect of IOT devices in this sector and how the probability of increase in its usage can be increased with time. The paper explores intrusiveness (INTR), Comfort (C), perceived usefulness (PU) and perceived ease of use (EOU) of SWH devices. The study hypothesized the Impact of PU and EOU, INTR and C on attitude and intention to use towards adoption of SWH devices. Partial Least Square Structured Equation Modeling (PLS – SEM) methodology was applied to explore the relationships between the concepts and hypothesis. The data was collected from 273 respondents. The age group of the respondents was between 25 and 40 years. The results indicated that intrusiveness and comfort do not have a significant direct impact on Intention to use BI (Behavior Intention) BI SWH devices. At the same time Intrusiveness had a significant impact on PU of SWH devices and Comfort has a strong significant impact on PU and EOU of smart wearables. The research has strong implications in the current emerging context of smart wearables, their design and effectiveness. Also the research can have lasting implications on elderly health and well-being. There are very few empirical studies in the area of SWH devices. Most of the studies till now are conceptual studies or providing technology architectures and frameworks. The research in this area is still at a very nascent stage and very few studies have been done to explore the use and adoption of SWH devices.