On the acceptance of motes in mainstream health monitoring

The need for providing health services to a growing aging population is escalating as there are increasing constraints in hospital space and trained medical staff. As a result of the growing number of people who need some form of medical aid (such as monitoring, surgery, treatment) new solutions need to be applied to deal with this urgent situation. This paper discusses a recent addition to health monitoring – Wireless Sensor Networks (Motes) – and its possible acceptance as a reliable and efficient monitoring tool. An acceptance model, Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology (UTAUT) has been applied to determine how viable this technology will be in medical institutions and patients’ homes. Thus, input derived from our preliminary survey provides a real-world opinion of Motes and how well the model reflects current attitudes and future outlook.

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