Building Trust in Wearables for Health Behavior

Abstract

Advances in Internet of Things (IoT) have given users the ability to monitor heart rate, calories burned, steps walked, time spent exercising, and the electrical activity of the heartbeat. Although major players in the wearable industry have marketed their wearables using the health and activity tracking features, a noteworthy health behavior change has not been observed at individual or societal level. A prominent barrier to adoption of healthcare features in these devices is lack of user trust. This research conceptualizes the formation of user’s initial trust in wearables. Here, wearable systems are proposed as three-dimensional framework constituting the device, the organization (manufacturer or appmaker), and the Internet. Understanding the formation of initial trust on wearable systems’ healthcare features can lead to improvement in user’s health-related behaviors, which in turn has the potential to cause a societal change in primary healthcare delivery.