Assessment of Technology Acceptance in Intensive Care Units

Abstract

The process of deploy a technology in critical services need to be very careful planned and processed. As an example it is the Intensive Care Unit (ICU). In the ICU the patients are in critically ill conditions and there are not available time to make experiences or to develop incomplete systems. With the objective to improve the implementation process, the same should be accompanied in order to understand the environment and user behaviour. In this case and with the goal to evaluate the implementation process, an assessment model was applied to a real system called INTCare. INTCare is a Pervasive Intelligent Decision Support System (PIDSS). It was deployed in the ICU of Centro Hospitalar do Porto and was evaluated using the Technology Acceptance Model 3 (TAM). This assessment was made using the four constructs proposed by the TAM and a questionnaire-based approach guided by the Delphi Methodology. The results obtained so far show that although the users are satisfied with the offered information recognizing this importance, they demand for a faster system. This work present the main results achieved and suggest one way to follow when some technology is deployed in an environment like is ICU.