Conceptualising Healthcare-Seeking as an Activity to Explain Technology Use: A Case of M-health

TL;DR

This paper proposes conceptualising healthcare-seeking as an activity using Activity Theory to better understand complex human-technology interactions in m-health, illustrated through a Kenyan case study.

Contribution

It operationalises Activity Theory to analyze healthcare-seeking behavior, providing a novel framework for understanding technology use in health contexts.

Findings

Explains diverse utilization behaviors in complex human-technology interactions.

Differentiates trust in intervention from trust in information.

Provides design insights for patient-centered m-health systems.

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to engage with the Information Systems' contexts of use as a means to explain nuanced human-technology interaction. In this paper, we specifically propose the conceptualisation of healthcare-seeking as an activity to offer a richer explanation of technology utilisation. This is an interpretivist study drawing on Activity Theory to conceptualise healthcare-seeking as the minimum context needed to explicate use. A framework of the core aspects of AT is used to analyse one empirical mHealth case from a Kenyan context thus illustrating how AT can be applied to study technology use. The paper explicates technology use by explaining various utilisation behaviour that may emerge in a complex human-technology interaction context; ranging from a complex adoption process to mechanisms to determine continuance that differentiate trust in the intervention from trust in the information, and potential technology coping strategies. The paper is a novel attempt to operationalise AT to study technology use. It thus offers a broader explication of use while providing insights for design and implementation made possible by the conceptualisation of healthcare-seeking as an activity. Such insights may be useful in the design of patient-centred systems.