Comparison of Older and Younger Adults' Attitudes Toward the Adoption and Use of Activity Trackers.

Sunyoung Kim,Abhishek Choudhury

doi:10.2196/18312

Abstract

BackgroundActivity tracking devices have significant potential in assisting older adults’ health care and quality of life, but this population lags behind in the adoption of these devices. While theoretical frameworks have been introduced to explain and increase the adoption of this technology by older adults, little effort has been made to validate the frameworks with people in other age groups.ObjectiveThe goal of this study was to validate the theoretical framework of technology acceptance by older adults that we previously proposed through a direct comparison of the attitudes to and experiences of activity trackers in older and younger users.MethodsSemistructured interviews were conducted with 2 groups of 15 participants to investigate their experiences of using activity trackers. The recruitment criteria included age (between 18 years and 24 years for the younger participant group or 65 years and older for the older participant group) and prior experiences of using mobile devices or apps for activity tracking for 2 months and longer.ResultsOur findings showed that the phase of perceived ease of learning as a significant influencer of the acceptance of activity trackers existed only in the older participant group, but this phase never emerged in the younger participant group. In addition, this study confirmed that other phases exist in both age groups, but 2 distinct patterns emerged according to age groups: (1) the social influence construct influenced the older participants positively but the younger participants negatively and (2) older participants’ exploration in the system experiment phase was purpose-driven by particular needs or benefits but for younger participants, it was a phase to explore a new technology.ConclusionsThis study confirms the validity of the proposed theoretical framework to account for the unique aspect of older adults’ technology adoption. This framework can provide theoretical guidelines when designing technology for older adults as well as when generating new investigations and experiments for older adults and technology use.

Highlights

Activity tracking devices that enable continuous monitoring of physical activities and physiological parameters have become widely available, allowing people to monitor their daily activity and overall health
The use of activity trackers by older adults is an area of particular research interest, since monitoring physical activity is a valuable parameter to define if persons are performing enough physical activities to prevent age-related chronic diseases or if they are manifesting early symptoms of those diseases [3]
Within the context of technology adoption and the aging population, researchers have attempted to conceptualize older adults’ technology acceptance [14,15,16]. As part of this effort, we proposed a new framework to account for older adults’ acceptance of mobile technology for health care in our previous work [7], wherein perceived ease of learning had a significant influence on older adults’ technology acceptance behavior, which did not appear in the existing frameworks

Summary

Introduction

Background Activity tracking devices that enable continuous monitoring of physical activities and physiological parameters have become widely available, allowing people to monitor their daily activity and overall health. The use of activity trackers by older adults is an area of particular research interest, since monitoring physical activity is a valuable parameter to define if persons are performing enough physical activities to prevent age-related chronic diseases or if they are manifesting early symptoms of those diseases [3]. Low adoption of technology by older adults is not specific to activity trackers but is common with regard to any personal computing devices. Little comparative evidence exists with regard to the usage patterns and perspectives of older adults on new technology in a direct comparison with those of persons of other age groups. While theoretical frameworks have been introduced to explain and increase the adoption of this technology by older adults, little effort has been made to validate the frameworks with people in other age groups

Methods

Results

Discussion

Conclusion