The Impact of Subjective Technology Adaptivity on the Willingness of Persons with Disabilities to Use Emerging Assistive Technologies: A European Perspective

Abstract

AbstractEmerging digital technologies like augmented reality (AR) hold promising prospects for people with disabilities. It remains, however, an open question how persons with disabilities respond to technological demands. The paper examines the potential impact of users’ self-assessment of their own competence in using these technologies on users’ responses by examining their Subjective Technology Adaptivity (STA) [1] and use intention to study the relationship between their self-assessed adaptivity and volitional technology use. To this end, data from 545 Europeans with different types of disabilities were collected based on an online survey. The research focused on six emerging assistive technologies related to mobility: accessible navigation systems, artificial intelligence alerts, wearables, robots, augmented reality and location-based alerts. The results show that the adaptivity to technology of people with disabilities predicts the use intention for emerging assistive technologies. There was, however, great variability depending on the type of disability. For example, a high STA of people with physical, visual, hearing or intellectual impairments predicted their willingness to use intention of AI-based alters but not for people with mental health issues or multiple impairments. Our findings shed new light on the role of perceived technology adaptivity of persons with disabilities for future technology use intention.