Acceptance of Mobile Technology by Older Adults: A Preliminary Study

Abstract

Mobile technologies offer the potential for enhanced healthcare, especially by supporting self-management of chronic care. For these technologies to impact chronic care, they need to work for older adults, because the majority of people with chronic conditions are older. A major challenge remains: integrating the appropriate use of such technologies into the lives of older adults. We investigated how older adults would accept mobile technologies by interviewing two groups of older adults (technology adopters and non-adopters who aged 60+) about their experiences and perspectives to mobile technologies. Our preliminary results indicate that there is an additional phase, the intention to learn, and three relating factors, self-efficacy, conversion readiness, and peer support, that significantly influence the acceptance of mobile technologies among the participants, but are not represented in the existing models. With these findings, we propose a tentative theoretical model that extends the existing theories to explain the ways in which our participants came to accept mobile technologies. Future work should investigate the validity of the proposed model by testing our findings against younger people.