EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

My doctor is an avatar! The effect of anthropomorphism and emotional receptivity on individuals' intention to use digital-based healthcare services

Andrea Sestino and Alfredo D'Angelo

Technological Forecasting and Social Change, 2023, vol. 191, issue C

Abstract: Alongside teleconsulting platforms, existing digital-based healthcare services propose automated solutions such as medical chatbots to interact with patients. Nevertheless, previous research stress their lack of human-like interactions delaying implementation. The advent of Metaverse may fill this gap by “catapulting” patients and doctors into a parallel virtual reality made up of avatars where interactions are as similar as those in the real world. By leveraging on a sample of 689 participants to an international experimental study, this paper investigates the effect of the human-like interactions (manipulated as low in case of medical chatbots vs high in case of doctors' avatars in the Metaverse) on the individuals' intention to use such digital-based healthcare services. We analyze the relationship through the perceived anthropomorphism mediating the two options. Moreover, by considering the peculiarities of the doctor-patient relationship resulting not only from professionalism but also from social interactions, we analyze the moderating effect of emotional receptivity. Results show that higher level human-like interactions (i.e., doctors' avatars in the Metaverse) positively influences individuals' intention to use such healthcare service via the effect of perceived anthropomorphism. Moreover, such effect is significant only among individuals who exhibit higher level of emotional receptivity.

Keywords: Healthcare; Digital-based healthcare services; Metaverse; Avatar; Anthropomorphism; Emotional receptivity; Intention to use; Chatbot (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (7)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0040162523001907
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:tefoso:v:191:y:2023:i:c:s0040162523001907

DOI: 10.1016/j.techfore.2023.122505

Access Statistics for this article

Technological Forecasting and Social Change is currently edited by Fred Phillips

More articles in Technological Forecasting and Social Change from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu (repec@elsevier.com).

 
Page updated 2024-12-28
Handle: RePEc:eee:tefoso:v:191:y:2023:i:c:s0040162523001907