Abstract
As the adoption of smartwatches continue to grow rapidly, there is a need to examine their usefulness as digital health tool and assess whether the micro-engagement feature has any influence on user’s health behavioural intentions or not. The purpose of this study was to examine the influence of AI-embedded smartwatch devices’ micro-engagements on users’ health behavioural intentions. This study sought to bridge the gap in the literature on whether the health alerts that smartwatches send to users have an influence on their decisions in as far as personal health and wellness is concerned. The Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology and the Theory of Planned Behaviour were applied to determine the psychological and technological factors that influences people’s intention to use smartwatch wearables for health-related reasons.
Data was collected from smartwatch users based in Gauteng province through a quantitative cross-sectional survey. A total of 183 participants completed the questionnaire and majority of them were aged between 25 and 44, 54% of them were females while 46% were males. The study found that majority of smartwatch users have started using the device in the past 1 to 2 years indicating the growing popularity of the device, most of them use their smartwatch predominately for fitness tracking. In addition, majority of the participants receive the health-related alerts from their smartwatches frequently however they do not find the alerts to be influential on their behaviour.