Capturing the Adoption Intention and Interest in InOvUS an Intelligent Oven: Segmenting Senior Users to Evaluate the Technology

Abstract

Cognitive issues associated with aging have become a major concern as it affects how seniors carry on activities of daily living, like cooking. The kitchen has been cited as the key problem area for seniors and it is well cited that almost all senior Americans and Canadians (90%) live independently in their community and wish to remain this way for as long as possible. We propose a solution, InOvUS, which focuses on safety and reducing the risk of fire, burn and intoxication for the rising senior population. We also developed a conceptual adoption model that is specific to the 65+ segment and that is based on existing scales like Consumer Adoption Intention (CAI), Consumer Innovativeness (CI), Technology Acceptance Model (TAM), Perceived Ease of Use (PEOU) and Perceived Usefulness (PU). We evaluate the adoption intention and interest of InOvUS by dissecting seniors’ willingness-to-adopt through the application of a cluster analytical procedure. The segments were profiled using K-Means analysis. Our results confirmed that the seniors do not behave like a homogenous group when assessing their need to acquire and use technologies such as InOvUS. Rather, four distinct segments further define the senior population, which differ considerably in terms of their buying intention, perceived usefulness, perceived ease of use, adoption intention and consumer innovativeness.