JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Background:

Digitization has experienced a great growth in the last years and has emerged as a very promising tool for health interventions, but it is necessary to evaluate the variables that may influence the results of this intervention and are related with the patients such as rejection, addition, or stress due to the use of technological devices. In these terms, there is a evidence gap due to the fact there is no consensus regarding the questionnaires or scales to evaluate these variables.

Objective:

To synthesize the evidence about the relationship between patients and technological devices, and develop a questionnaire to measure levels of technophilia, technophobia and technostress.

Methods:

The systematic review included studies focused on the use of different questionnaires to evaluate the influence of technology on people. During the analysis, the data selected from each study were scale used, main variable, country and language used, sample size and study setting. In addition, for the development of the new questionnaire, Delphi procedure was used through the recruitment of ten experts, including software engineers, medical doctors, professors, and patients who completed two rounds of questionnaires.

Results:

Seven studies with a total of 3505 subjects were included. Among the studies, three of them evaluated technostress; two focused on technophobia, one assessed technophilia, and the other two studies combined the evaluation of technophobia and technophilia. Regarding the domains and items used, these were evaluated using Cronbach’s alpha scoring a range between 0.82 and 0.95. However, these results were greatly minor using other domains such as techno-communication avoidance device (0.491). Taking into account these domains, a questionnaire was constructed a priori and was refined through the two rounds of the Delphi panel, obtaining a new scale with three domains and eight items, establishing a minimum degree of agreement of 60% for priority items and 40% for secondary items.

Conclusions:

A panel of experts were able to develop, based on the previous systematic review and on their own judgment, the eight items and the three domains to be included in the TECHNO-PROMS questionnaire, establishing a specific level of consensus, in order to plan a validation study for this scale.