期刊名称：Journal of Higher Education Outreach and Engagement
印刷版ISSN：1534-6102
出版年度：2018
卷号：22
期号：3
页码：233-234
出版社：University of Georgia
摘要：E-pharmacies are an excellent form of health informatics to enhance health care management efficacy among seniors by offering access to reliable health information and medication management services. However, seniors’ cognitive aging is often associated with difficulty in learning and retaining new system knowledge, deterring them from using e-pharmacies and leading to social and emotional challenges. To address these challenges, we developed an intelligent agent, or a virtual persona embedded in web interfaces. The agent acted as a virtual pharmacist, providing step-by-step verbal and visual guidance for various e-pharmacy tasks. In collaboration with a local pharmacy and three local senior-serving agencies in Alabama, we implemented this agent in an e-pharmacy interface and invited 24 male and 26 female seniors to experience it. Participants’ ages ranged from 65 to 84. The results revealed that seniors perceived significantly higher ease of use with (vs. without) the virtual pharmacist’s assistance (p < .05). This enhanced ease of use led to the seniors’ increased self-efficacy using the e-pharmacy (β = .81, p < .01). Seniors also perceived higher social support when receiving virtual pharmacist assistance (p < .01), which in turn drove increased trust in the ability (β = .79, p < .001) and integrity (β = .70, p < .001) of the e-pharmacy in meeting their needs. The enhanced efficacy (β = .28, p < .05) and trust in ability (β = .59, p < .001) resulted in greater satisfaction with the e-pharmacy, which in turn facilitated the seniors’ intention to use the e-pharmacy for future needs. This outreach and research program showed the potential of increasing seniors’ engagement with health informatics through the use of intelligent agent technology. Further, the significant role of an intelligent agent may extend beyond the senior population and address the cognitive, social, and emotional obstacles to using health informatics among many other underserved user groups.
