Influence of Technology Affordance on the Adoption of Mobile Technologies for Diabetes Self-management

摘要

Diabetes is a costly chronic disease, and a leading cause of death and disability worldwide. According to a report from the Center for Disease Control, diabetes cost an estimated $245 billion to the US economy in 2012 [12]. Like other chronic conditions, such as hypertension, heart disease, and cancer, there is no cure for diabetes. However, the debilitating effects of the disease can be slowed down and the patient's quality of life improved by proper care management. In this context, self-management practices that enable a patient to play an active role in managing his/her health condition have been found to be very effective in improving the patient's quality of life while lowering the overall healthcare cost [5, 35,46]. Therefore, encouraging diabetes patients to adopt self-management practices has become a part of the best practices in diabetes care management [7, 24, 51]. Diabetes self-management practices include activities, such as, eating healthy food, exercising regularly, monitoring and maintaining blood sugar level, etc. In recent times, mobile technology-based interventions, including apps and devices, have been developed to help diabetics follow self-management practices. Several studies have found such interventions to be helpful in promoting diabetes self-management [23, 30], However, the adoption of such mobile technology-based interventions are very limited [2, 19]. The goal of this study is to understand what facilitates adoption of mobile technologies for diabetes self-management.