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Abstract

Bringing hospitality inside seniors’ homes is an essential challenge. The objective of this paper is to focus on the impact of trust and social presence through connected health technologies on the quality of service perceived. We used SERVQUAL for measuring the quality of service delivered by home care companies. We also adapted SERVQUAL to our context by adding a new dimension called communication. As far as the methodology is concerned, we distributed our survey by post to 605 seniors. We targeted elderly people using connected health technologies (assistive alarm, telecare, sensors, etc.) at home and receiving health care at home. We received 213 questionnaires back. As we had several latent variables, we used partial least squares (PLS), a variance-based structural equation modeling method. The results show that the level of trust in these technologies impacts significantly almost all dimensions of SERVQUAL. In parallel, the perception of the social presence with the use of these technologies impacts positively the empathy and tangibles dimensions of SERVQUAL. These results are particularly relevant to stakeholders in the health industry in their quest to improve their products/services. A better understanding of the relation that the elderly have with connected health technologies is an essential prerequisite to supporting the development of new solutions capable of meeting the specific needs of our seniors.

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