Accepted for/Published in: JMIR mHealth and uHealth
Date Submitted: Jan 24, 2018
Open Peer Review Period: Jan 25, 2018 - Aug 17, 2018
Date Accepted: Oct 20, 2018
(closed for review but you can still tweet)
Health Care Provider Perceptions of Consumer-Grade Devices and Apps for Tracking Health: A Pilot Study
ABSTRACT
Background:
The use of Web- or mobile phone-based apps for tracking health indicators has increased greatly. However, provider perceptions of consumer-grade devices have not been widely explored.
Objective:
The purpose of this study was to determine primary care physicians’ and advanced practice registered nurses’ perceptions of consumer-grade sensor devices and Web- or mobile phone-based apps that allow patients to track physical activity, diet, and sleep.
Methods:
We conducted a cross-sectional mailed survey with a random sample of 300 primary care physicians and 300 advanced practice registered nurses from Michigan, USA. Providers’ use and recommendation of these types of technologies, and their perceptions of the benefits of and barriers to patients’ use of the technologies for physical activity, diet, and sleep tracking were key outcomes assessed.
Results:
Most of the respondents (189/562, 33.6% response rate) were advanced practice registered nurses (107/189, 56.6%). Almost half of the sample (93/189, 49.2%) owned or used behavioral tracking technologies. Providers found these technologies to be helpful in clinical encounters, trusted the data, perceived their patients to be interested in them, and did not have concerns over the privacy of the data. However, the providers did perceive patient barriers to using these technologies. Additionally, those who owned or used these technologies were up to 6.5 times more likely to recommend them to their patients.
Conclusions:
Our study demonstrated that many providers perceived benefits for their patients to use these technologies, including improved communication. Providers’ concerns included their patients’ access and the usability of these technologies. Providers who encountered data from these technologies during patient visits generally perceive this to be helpful. We additionally discuss the barriers perceived by the providers and offer suggestions and future research to realize the potential benefits to using these data in clinical encounters.
Citation

Per the author's request the PDF is not available.
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.