A Proposed Conceptual Framework for Mobile Health Technology Adoption Among Employees at Workplaces in Malaysia

With the rising incidence and cost of lifestyle diseases among working population, many organizations are becoming increasingly concerned with health promotion and protection. Although many organizations established workplace health promotion (WHP), the uptake of these interventions is low. The emergence of mobile health technologies (MHTs), such as smartphone health applications and connected wearable devices, provide an excellent opportunity for increasing WHP effectiveness. Despite the potential, the benefits of this initiative could not be fully utilized without understanding the employees' perception towards adoption and use of MHTs. While mHealth acceptance has been studied in different contexts, the adoption among employees at workplace received limited attention. Therefore, this study attempts to bridge the gap in the literature by identifying the factors that influence employees at the workplace to adopt and use MHTs. The study addresses the adoption factors from technology acceptance and health behavior perspectives. The proposed conceptual framework incorporates technology acceptance determinants from UTAUT2: performance expectancy, effort expectancy, social influence, facilitating condition, hedonic motivation and health-related determinants (perceived vulnerability, perceived severity). Furthermore, perceived privacy risk, and personal innovativeness found to influence the behavioral intention. Personal innovativeness (PI) and demographic factors (age & gender) found to moderate the relationship between main constructs, behavioral intention, and the actual use. The finding of the study help both policy makers the application developers to understand the critical factors that might influence employees to use mobile technologies for improving their health and enhancing productivity and performance at work.