Human Factors Affecting the Adoption of Healthcare 4.0

Recent advances in digitalizing healthcare services and related systems show great promise of effective use of technology to enhance the healthcare sector. Healthcare and healthcare-related industries are moving forward with the adoption of various smart services and Healthcare 4.0 systems to reduce costs, improve care, and enhance patient satisfaction. However, the research and development communities are offering a lot of innovative frameworks, applications and techniques to fully transform the healthcare industry into Healthcare 4.0. Adopting such technologies and solutions face various challenges. Some are technical and many of these are solvable, some financial, which can be addressed, somehow; yet, there are other obstacles hindering the efforts, namely, humans! Smart systems in general are invasive and require people to accept how these systems will be involved in their every day life. This leads to another important aspect, trust, as such invasive behavior require humans to trust these systems and those who operate them. They may also replace human interactions, which many see as essential for successful patient/practitioner relationships. Moreover, some view these as replacement for human workers, which may lead to layoffs and financial hardships. In this paper, we investigate the human factor affecting the acceptance and adoption of Healthcare 4.0 and smart healthcare systems among the different stakeholders. We will review current work on the topic and identify the major factors with respect to how they affect stakeholders and whether these are solvable with advances in technology. We see that technology can help solve many of the issues affecting human’s acceptance, yet there are also ones that are not, no matter how advanced the technology can get.