Accepted for/Published in: JMIR Aging
Date Submitted: Feb 2, 2024
Open Peer Review Period: Feb 9, 2024 - Apr 5, 2024
Date Accepted: Aug 23, 2024
(closed for review but you can still tweet)
Warning: This is an author submission that is not peer-reviewed or edited. Preprints - unless they show as "accepted" - should not be relied on to guide clinical practice or health-related behavior and should not be reported in news media as established information.
Decoding eHealth Influence on Autonomy, Competence, and Relatedness in Older Adults: A Qualitative Analysis of Self-Determination through the Motivational Technology Model
ABSTRACT
Background:
Older adults adopt and use eHealth systems to build autonomy, competence, and relatedness, and engage in healthy behaviors. The motivational technology model (MTM) posits that interactive technology features, such as those on websites, smart displays, and mobile phones, must allow for navigability, interactivity, and customizability, which spur feelings of self-determination and intrinsic motivation. We study ElderTree, a web-based system for older adults that provides on demand videos of healthy living content, self-monitoring, and weekly researcher-hosted video meetings.
Objective:
We aim to understand the theoretical crossover between the MTM and self-determination theory, using features of ElderTree to understand usability of the technology and how it may support older adults autonomy, competence, and relatedness.
Methods:
We interviewed 22 older adults with multiple chronic conditions about their use of this application and overall health habits.
Results:
Older adults did find features within ElderTree supported feelings of autonomy, such as through providing content available on demand; competence, such as with good navigation; and relatedness with weekly researcher-led video calls.
Conclusions:
Participants confirmed the features that increased internal motivation, such as interactivity correlating with feelings of relatedness, but they also found other ways to support autonomous health behavior change, beyond narrow views of navigability, interactivity, and customization.
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Copyright
© The authors. All rights reserved. This is a privileged document currently under peer-review/community review (or an accepted/rejected manuscript). Authors have provided JMIR Publications with an exclusive license to publish this preprint on it's website for review and ahead-of-print citation purposes only. While the final peer-reviewed paper may be licensed under a cc-by license on publication, at this stage authors and publisher expressively prohibit redistribution of this draft paper other than for review purposes.