Chronic Patients' Emotions Toward Self-Managing Care IT: The Role of Health Centrality and Dependence on IT

Abstract

Patients’ emotions toward health IT can play an important role in explaining their usage of it. One form of health IT is self-managing care IT, such as activity trackers that can be used by chronic patients to adopt a healthy lifestyle. The goal of this study is to understand the factors that influence the arousal of emotions in chronic patients while using these tools. Past studies, in general, tend to emphasize how IT shapes emotions, underplaying the role of the individual user’s identity and, specifically, how central health is to the user’s self in shaping emotions. In this research, the authors argue that patients’ health identity centrality (i.e., the extent to which they consider health as central to their sense of self) can play an important role in forming their dependence on health IT by affecting their use of it directly and shaping their emotions around it.