Page 53 - Exploring the Potential of Self-Monitoring Kidney Function After Transplantation - Céline van Lint

Patient Acceptance of a Self-Management Support System 51
address if patients think they can handle the system. So far, results concerning the role of self-efficacy in technology acceptance have been mixed. Venkatesh et al., for example, left out self-efficacy in the UTAUT model because they failed to find a stable association over time between self-efficacy and behavioural intention [27]. Others, however, do report self-efficacy beliefs as a significant precursor to information technology use [41, 42]. In the health informatics domain, however, self-efficacy was found to be indirectly linked with behavioural intention by influencing perceived usefulness and perceived ease of use [25]. This leads to the sixth hypothesis:
H6: Self-efficacy positively correlates with patients’ intention to use the SMSS.
Trust
Trust (TR) is defined as the degree to which patients believe that using the system will occur in a safe and reliable manner, consistent with their expectations of the health management task [13]. The latter is important because using any system does not mean that the patients themselves will always be safe, but that the system will run in a safe and reliable way. Participants are therefore asked how trustworthy they find the system. Although trust is not included in the generic models, it has been included in extensions of these models, for example as an extension of TAM regarding Internet shopping [43, 44]. In this case, people are concerned about losing their money, which might stop them from making online purchases. Similarly in the health informatics domain, various trust aspects have been identified, including personal technical insecurity, perceived threat, and perceived health risk [23-25]. Renal patients’ trust in a SMSS is therefore suggested to influence their willingness to use such a system. This leads to the seventh hypothesis:
H7: Trust positively correlates with patients’ intention to use the SMSS.
Behavioural Intention
Behavioural intention (BI) is defined as the degree to which an individual intends to perform a certain behaviour [12]. People’s behavioural intention determines their performance of the behaviour and it is widely used to evaluate user acceptance of technology [12, 15, 23, 24, 27]. In the case of a SMSS for renal patients, the intended behaviour is the patients’ use of this system for managing their health. In this paper it is hypothesised and tested that all the factors introduced earlier on, i.e. PE, EE, SI, FC, AF, SE, and TR, positively correlate with patients’ intention to use and therefore acceptance of the SMSS (figure 1).
3