Evaluation of factors influencing willingness to use cloud-based serious games for OHS promotion in SMEs

Occupational health and safety (OHS) cloud-based serious games are considered as a value-added service to SMEs that contributes to the enhancement of workers’ OHS knowledge and decreasing the job hazard rate. In particular such a learning system is useful for SMEs because of low implementation costs besides the benefits in providing a sustainable learning atmosphere for working by synchronizing fun and the transfer of knowledge. In order to design OHS cloud-based serious game systems effectively and according to the needs of the consumers and to enlarge the market of the mentioned system, it is important to study the factors that cause SMEs and the incentives for workers. Hence, the present paper evaluates factors that deal with willingness to use cloud-based serious games for occupational health and safety (OHS) purposes in SMEs. The methodology of this study contains three major steps for identification of the clusters, recognition of the factors in each cluster and evaluation of the factors using an Analytic Network Process (ANP) method. Fulfilling the first and second steps lead to a conceptual framework of the factors that affect willingness to use OHS cloudbased serious game by SMEs. The framework also could be used as part of evaluation process during product development by the service providers. Finally the ANP results represent that due to the limited market and high costs of designing a high quality serious game, focusing on OHS learning content and learning theory is more important than technical features of serious games for SMEs.