Acceptance of ICTs for health and/or Physical Activity Monitoring in Patients with Chronic Diseases

Abstract

Physical activity (PA) is a cornerstone of medical treatment in chronic patients but difficult to maintain over the long term. The Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) offer new possibilities to provide support for patients and to monitor PA. The aim of this study was to assess the knowledge about, the use of and the interest in ICTs for health and PA monitoring, and to evaluate the influence of gender, age and socio-professional category on ICT acceptance. A survey on ICT’s knowledge, use and acceptance was specifically elaborated for this study. Patients participating in a supervised PA training program completed this survey during a face-to-face visit. Seventy-eight patients between 45 and 79 years old were surveyed. Most of them had access to the Internet (92%) and owned a smartphone (69%). Age was the major factor influencing access to and technical knowledge about ICTs. Half of the patients were in favor of using ICTs for health and PA monitoring. The factors that conditioned this acceptance were to be young, highly educated, and to have already used ICTs. The other half of the patients were opposed to ICTs because of the complexity and constraints of these technologies, and because they worried about the lack of data security. These results emphasize the need to know more about the profile of the patients in order to propose the relevant personalized PA support.