JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Background:

Activity tracking devices have significant potential to assist older adults’ healthcare and quality of life, but this population shows slow rates of their adoption. While theoretical frameworks have been introduced to explain and increase the adoption of technology for older adults, little effort has been made to validate the frameworks with people in other age groups.

Objective:

This paper aims to validate the theoretical framework we propose to explain technology acceptance for older adults by directly comparing the similarities and differences between the attitudes and experiences of older and younger users of activity trackers.

Methods:

We conducted semi-structured interviews with two groups of 15 participants to investigate their everyday experiences of using activity trackers. Two recruitment criteria included age (between 18 and 24 or 65 and older) and prior experiences of using mobile devices or applications for activity tracking for 2 months and longer.

Results:

The findings show that the phase of perceived ease of learning existed only among older users as a significant influencer on their acceptance of activity trackers, but it never emerged among younger users. In addition, this study confirms that other phases exist in both age groups, while two distinct patterns emerged by age groups: (1) the social influence construct influenced older users positively but negatively for younger users, and (2) older users’ exploration in the system experiment phase was purposeful, driven by particular needs or benefits, but for younger users it was a phase to explore a new technology’s features and functionalities.

Conclusions:

Our study confirmed the validity of the theoretical framework we proposed that explicates older adults’ technology acceptance. We believe our model can provide theoretical guidelines when designing a technology and may also be able to generate new investigations and experiments.