Abstract
Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD) is a long-term progressive inflammatory lung disease causing chronic breathlessness and many hospital admissions. It affects up to 1.2 million people in the UK. To help people with COPD self-manage their condition we developed, in partnership with healthcare users, a digital mobile phone app called COPD.Pal®. We report the first user feedback of COPD.Pal®, applying the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) theoretical framework.11 participants engaged with a click dummy version of COPD.Pal® before being asked questions relating to their experiences. A deductive, semantic, reflexive thematic analysis was conducted to analyse their individual and collective experiences. The study was registered at Clinical Trials.gov (NCT04142957).Two overarching themes resulted: Ease of Use and Perceived Usefulness. Within the former, participants discussed how they wanted flexibility and choice in how they engaged with the app; including how often they used it. Additionally, they discussed how the app layout should make it straightforward to use, whilst unanimously agreeing that COPD.Pal® provided this. Within Perceived Usefulness, participants discussed how they wanted the information they entered into the app to be useful, in addition to the app providing resources regarding COPD. Lastly, there was disagreement regarding preferences for further app development.We found that COPD.Pal® was usable and acceptable by people with COPD and TAM provided a useful theoretical framework for both structuring discussions with users and analysing their comments.
Highlights
Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD) is a global problem, with 210 million sufferers and 3 million deaths annually [1]
We summarise how participants described their experiences of COPD.Pal®, using the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) overarching theoretical framework, within the concepts of Ease of use and Perceived usefulness
In general, participants did discuss COPD.Pal® in terms of the app’s ease of use and perceived usefulness, and large sections of discourse were devoted to the interlinked relationship between these two concepts
Summary
Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD) is a global problem, with 210 million sufferers and 3 million deaths annually [1]. Health and Technology (2021) 11:111–117 encouraged to self-manage their condition; here behaviours including regular exercise, taking prescribed medication, being aware of symptoms, and attending healthcare appointments are encouraged [8]. Perceived ease of use influences perceived usefulness, in that as the former increases, so too does the latter This theory has been used previously to understand acceptance of other healthcare technologies [20, 21] This first phase study empirically explores the early development of COPD.Pal® using qualitative methodology to answer the question: ‘how do people with COPD experience the usability and acceptability of the COPD.Pal® app?’
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