Effectiveness of Smartwatches on Enhancing Health Consciousness among University Students in Hong Kong

Abstract

Both smart wristbands and smartwatches enable their users to manage their health and well-being on a personal basis by continuously monitoring physiological parameters. They provide fitness tracking functions with some subtle differences. The primary purpose of smart wristband is to track users’ activities (e.g. pulse or steps) and present relevant data on small displays whereas smartwatches offer additional functions such as message notifications, GPS navigation and calendar synchronization. Smartwatches are considered as general-purpose and networked computers with an array of sensors instead of a chronograph. Past studies on smart wrist-worn devices have focused on perception and technology acceptance of the use of those devices, and factors affecting the intention to use those devices. Chuah et al. (2016) reported that the wearers viewed the smart wrist-worn devices as fashion accessories. On the contrary, Jung, Kim, and Choi (2016) found the wearers did consider the functions of the devices. Regarding the factors that affect the intention to use the devices, the price of the wearable technologies is considered to be the main factor that affects the potential users’ willingness of purchases. Another key user concern is about privacy issue. Potential consumers concern the risk of information exposure by the device manufacturers since the devices can store the sensitive personal and health information (Yang, Zo & Choi, 2016; Li, Wu & Gao 2016). Nevertheless, little attention has been paid to investigate whether the use of smartwatches can help improve the wearers’ health awareness. This paper reports a preliminary study designed to address such a research gap. The research question of the study is whether the use of smartwatches can enhance their users’ health awareness among university students in Hong Kong. Research data are collected from online survey and interviews. All university students in Hong Kong who wear smartwatches are the target population. The target number of samples is set to 100. Attitudinal measures and factual measures are used in most of the questions in the online questionnaire. SPSS is used to analyze the quantitative data. One-on-one interview is used to gain deeper understanding of any users’ behavior changes in healthy lifestyle after they utilize smartwatches. This research can inform smartwatch designers on the user needs of smartwatch wearers so that they can develop new or enhance existing smartwatch features to meet the expectation of the potential users. This will enhance user satisfaction and potentially increase sales revenue for the smartwatch industry. Increased use and enhancement of smartwatches can potentially contribute to enhanced individual and societal health and fitness levels and thus reduce expenditure on health care.