User needs and wants for disease self-management devices

Background: Chronic disease is the leading cause of death all over the world nowadays. In chronic disease self-management practice, self-testing device is developed at the basis of providing patient with more regular check of their health condition. Besides, the convenient use of self-testing device also increases patients’ participation and motivation of disease self-management. The highly demand of self-testing device brings great opportunity for medical technology companies to develop productions according to people’s needs and wants. However, the preference of self-testing device is unclear. Our aim is to investigate the preference of the general public towards self-testing devices and the influence factors of people’s willingness to perform self-test in managing their disease and/or health. Method: An online questionnaire was designed. We included the EuroQol Group 5-Dimension Self-Report Questionnaire score (EQ5D) with 5 levels to measure the perceived health state. We selected six items from the instrument used in the three-year European Health Literacy project to investigate functional health literacy. We made the self-efficacy questions based on the standard scale in Stanford patient education program. Moreover, we built scenarios to test people’s attitude towards self-testing. In order to elicit the preference, best worst scaling method was used with case 2 and case 3 format. The online survey was carried out in British sample. Result: 512 respondents completed the entire questionnaire. The average age was 43.0 (SD=23.7). 27.0% (169/625) of the respondents had chronic disease. Asthma was selected for 53 times, being the most in our research sample. There were 33 respondents indicated that they had two chronic diseases at the same time. Most of the respondents perceived good health state. Between chronic disease and non-chronic disease samples, there was statistical significance in EQ5D. More than 78.44% of the respondents thought it was easy to understand health information on average. 74.0% of chronic disease patients managed their disease. The results of correlation analysis indicated gender, age, ethnic, health literacy, and self-efficacy had impact on the attitude of self-management. Respondents had good self-efficacy for self-management and self-testing. Convenience and ease of use were the main reasons for people to perform self-testing. In BWS case 2 the log likelihood = -17677.59, p = 0.001 in conditional logistic regression model. Respondents considered attribute 1 ‘portability’ as the most important. There was similar result in BWS case 3. The average time respondents spent to complete the questionnaire was 24 minutes 5 seconds. Conclusion: ‘Pen size’, ‘onetime cost £ 300’, ‘daily use‘, ‘good technical and skill need’, ‘performance score feedback indicating if the result is good or not’, ‘feedback within 10 minutes’ were the most desirable characteristics of a self-testing device. Besides, people’s willingness may change when they were equipped by confidence, skills, and knowledge. This research provides useful information for stakeholders to make decisions about the design, development, and investment of a device. The finding is of great importance for medical technical company to design self-testing devices according to user’ needs and wants. Also the information is useful for stakeholders to make decisions about investment and reimbursement of a self-testing device.