Impact of Smartphones on Quality of Life: A Health Information Behavior Perspective
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Impact of Smartphones on Quality of Life: A Health Information Behavior Perspective Fereshteh Ghahramani 1 & Jingguo Wang 2
# Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2019
Abstract Healthcare is the sector that was significantly changed by the arrival of mobile devices. This study investigates how an individual using smartphones impact quality of life by changing his or her health information behavior. Our results show that individuals with a smartphone are more likely to seek and track their health information than those who with a regular cell phone, and consequently, the former experience a better quality of life. Moreover, using smartphone more likely leads to seek health information for care-givers than non-caregivers, as well as for the younger individuals than the older. Keywords Smartphone . Quality of life . Health information behavior . Caregiver . Age
1 Introduction Smartphones are handheld-sized devices that enable mobile communication and computation (Mosa et al. 2012; Pandey et al. 2013). Compared to regular cell phones, smartphones have more memory, a faster processor, a larger interface, a navigation system, and a greater set of functionalities and features, such as easier access to the Internet (Ozdalga et al. 2012; Xia et al. 2014). Surfing web pages and seeking information are normally easy and fast on a smartphone. Moreover, smartphone users can install and run mobile apps (Kirwan et al. 2013) for various purposes (Soikkeli et al. 2011). Not long, smartphones have been transforming healthcare (Ozdalga et al. 2012). Inherently, there are a lot of uncertainties in healthcare for both care providers and patients. Such uncertainties may come from various sources, and have different forms. For example, diagnosing the disease, selecting a procedure, and assessing the possibilities can be
* Jingguo Wang [email protected] Fereshteh Ghahramani [email protected] 1
School of Computing, College of Computing and Digital Media, DePaul University, 243 South Wabash Avenue, Chicago, IL 60604, USA
2
Information Systems and Operations Management, College of Business, University of Texas at Arlington, 701 S. West Street, Box 19437, Arlington, TX 76019, USA
the sources of uncertainty which are due to the unpredictable and complex trajectories of diseases and limited scientific knowledge (Lanham et al. 2014; Sturmberg and Lanham 2014; Han et al. 2011). While a number of studies have explored what motivate users select smartphones to obtain information (D. Chung and Chun 2011; Pheeraphuttharangkoon 2015; Tahamtan et al. 2017), there have been a few studies (Park and Lee 2012) that examine how selecting and using smartphones can affect the way individuals are satisfied with their lives– so called quality of life (Bevan et al. 2014). Broadly speaking, this paper investigates how technology benefits individuals’ life. While it seems apparent that smartphones facilitate information seeking and tracking, the unique aspect of this study is to explore how using such devices improves qua
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