Achieving End User Acceptance: Building Blocks for an Evidence-Based User-Centered Framework for Health Technology Development and Assessment

Innovative healthcare services and technologies show great promises for reducing individual and societal burdens, but predominantly fail to attract sufficient end user acceptance and usage. This renders the aspect of technology adoption as key weakness of most health technology development endeavors, but also as most promising area for implementing changes that can dramatically increase the likelihood of project success. The purpose of this paper is to discuss some core assumptions of a user-centered process framework for technology adoption that addresses three major weaknesses of many current adoption models: First, the inadequate consideration of the process character of health technology adoptions. Second, the restricted view of human motivation, information processing, and behavior as being primarily rational and utilitarian in nature. And third, the insufficient attention to situational and social influences, and the role of individual differences. Theoretical, methodological, user inclusion-related and communication-related implications of the proposed prespective changes are