Wearable Technology in Health Care – Acceptance and Technical Requirements for Medical Information Systems

The aim of this paper is to investigate the acceptance of wearable devices in healthcare. Despite increasing reliability of data generated by wearable devices, not many institutions in the healthcare sector use wearables for patient care or safety. The benefit of having accurate patient data over a certain period of time is often neglected by the fact that the medical personnel and patients do not fully accept the technological improvement. Another issue is the interoperability between the device itself and the hospital information systems, e.g. data generated may not be further processed due to lacking data standards or interfaces. In order to investigate the acceptance of stakeholders of wearable devices a survey based on use cases was sent out to medical and administrative staff of Swiss hospitals. Finally, a technical feasibility study was conducted in order to find the technical requirements and challenges for the integration of wearable devices in the hospital IT environment.