Design-for-user Acceptance of IOT Home use medical device: A design process for IOT home use medical device
Authors: Thongprasert Apiwat , Jiamsanguanwong Arisara , Tanlamai Uthai 
Published: June 2022

Medical devices are migrating from hospital use to home use along with health professional users to lay users. New technologies, including Internet-Of-Things, lead home use medical devices to a new generation of easy to use, smart, portable, and communicable from anywhere. IOT technology enables the home use medical devices to seamlessly detect and connect home patient health status and health activities allowing the patients to remotely connect and share their health data to friends, family, and healthcare staff. Thus, home use medical devices with IOT connectivity play an essential role in assisting home patients to continue their medical care at home and monitor health activities, reducing the risk associated with non-communicable diseases (NCDs) in the first place. The devices empower the home patients to actively manage their health treatment and activities by themselves, either without or with minimum training experience and support. The targeted users of such devices are not limited to patients with chronic diseases but consumers who want to prevent them from serious illness and maintain good health. Accordingly, the success of the IOT home use medical devices also depends on the acceptance and adherence of the users to use the device as a part of their everyday lives. Developing medical devices concerning human factors to be safe and effective is crucial. Many studies contribute to providing design processes and methodologies in this regard. Furthermore, in the case of the IOT home use medical device development, engineers or designers must also understand the acceptance and adherence of the users toward the use of the devices in their daily life routine. Several studies coined the term as consumer medical devices bringing the consumer product development concept to use in this home use medical device development. Though several studies revealed factors influencing user acceptance of the devices such as convenience, ease-of-use, or usefulness, it still is difficult for engineers or designers who do not have expertise or experience in human factor research to integrate the knowledge with existing device development processes. This study proposes a T-A-C-V-I-U model linking relationships from IOT functions to device attributes, consequence, personal values, attitude toward using, and behavioral intention. The model aimed to analyze how device attributes would affect user acceptance. It was constructed from literature reviews on IOT functions, wearable and IOT device attributes, and factors influencing personal value and user acceptance based on Technology Acceptance Model (TAM), Health Belief Model (HBM), and Hierarchical Value Map (HVM). The model would assist non-user research or less-experienced human factor designers to consider which IOT functions should be embedded on a home use medical device to gain user acceptance. Vice versa, it would help assess how determined IOT functions would influence targeted users' acceptance. Finally, the Design-for-user Acceptance of IOT Home use medical device (DfAIH), a design process dedicated for IOT home use medical device development, is proposed. The design process is constructed following the design-for-x framework. It provides a step-by-step design process to convey product development and validation using the T-A-C-V-I-U model to gain user acceptance.