Market Adoption Study for Wearable Mobile Computing

Abstract

Wearable technology as new emerging technology is expected to become mainstream, after the phenomena of the mass market adoption of smartphone usage especially in Malaysia (Osman et al., 2012; Lazim and Sasitharan, 2015), with various mobile applications developments for better daily lives. Recent technological innovations in mobile computing, enhancing the innovation of wearable computing technology, known as a body worn computing (Jhajharia et al., 2014; Buenaflor and Kim, 2013; Baber, 2001; Kuru and Erbuğ, 2013), facilitate users’ interaction at any time anywhere seamlessly. Wearable mobile computing refers to embedded electronic technologies worn on the human body as unobtrusively as apparel. This paper concerns the study of smartwatches that continuously provide an interface for many computing tasks, with mobile smartphones acting as a hub (Wei, 2014; Taib et al., 2016). The highest proliferation of wearable devices are currently smartwatches (Kim and Shin, 2015; Chuah et al., 2016; Choi and Kim, 2016) that are targeted to perform multitasking as a smartphone does. However, in term of users’ acceptance this is still at its infancy stage. It is a challenging field to predict what factors may drive potential users to accept this new emerging technology thus increasing innovation diffusion. The characteristic of wearable mobile computing is the ability to provide anytime/anywhere services. Mobility is the element of mobile computing technology which may influence smartwatch adoption (Kim and Shin, 2015). Thus, further study on the innovation adoption of wearable mobile technology is essential to give the insightful knowledge to researchers whether in academia or industry, service providers, software designer and adopters. This research study empirically examines the designed and development of framework (as shown in Figure 1) to deepen the understanding the factors that influence potential users to accept wearable mobile computing, integrating the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) factors (Davis, 1989); relative to aspects of perceived usefulness (PU) and perceived ease of use (PEU); observability (OBS) selected from Diffusion of Innovation Theory (DOI) (Rogers, 1995); and other related factors of mobility (MOB), personalisation (PN), facilitating conditions (FC): as well as perceived enjoyment (PE) to integrate social influence (SI) and mobile application (MA) as the precursor underpinning the study.

The survey is based on self-administered questionnaires (quantitative approach) adapted from literature which were distributed and analysed using IBM SPSS software (v.20). Data of 272 respondents from central and southern region of Malaysia comprising university students and a professional utilising clustering sample (Awang, 2012) was collected. Empirical findings from regression analysis revealed the dominant predicted factors are perceived usefulness, mobility linked factor with observability, perceived enjoyment linked factor with personalisation and facilitating condition significantly influence the potential users to accept wearable mobile computing in Malaysia. Perceived ease of use was found not significantly influencing the users’ acceptance of wearable mobile computing.