Evaluation of incentives for body area network-based healthcare systems

With ever-increasing advancements of body area networks and participatory sensing, various healthcare applications have emerged. These applications are used to collect physiological and activity data from people and to evaluate their health situation in an online manner. The ultimate goal here is to ensure health and well-being of participants. Although various researches have been performed on underlying system of these applications from the technical point of view, very few have focused on ways to encourage people to use them and to increase their acceptability. In this paper, we present a taxonomy for motivations and incentives used in body area network based healthcare systems. Furthermore, we identify incentives´ features and output expectancies and use them in a model to determine important factors that persuade people to accept and use a health monitoring system. Finally, we evaluate each incentive using Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP) technique to identify the most effective elements of each incentive having a specific goal in mind.