Mobile Acceptance Questionnaire in Physiotherapy

Overview

Many studies were conducted on the determinants and acceptance of mobile or wearable health care technology (mHealth). However, little research was done on physiotherapists' thinking regarding the use of mHealth. In this study, it was aimed to test the suitability of the Physiotherapy Mobile Acceptance Questionnaire -PTMAQ which was developed by Blumenthal et al. \[6\] to evaluate the physiotherapists' Perspectives on the Use of Mobile or Wearable Technology in their clinical practice, to the assessments of physiotherapists (to understand attitudes and possible barriers). PTMAQ, based on the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) by Blumenthal et al. \[6\] was translated into Turkish and applied to Physiotherapists working in Turkey. Thus, it is expected that the results to be obtained after the scale is applied in Turkish language and in the Turkish sample will contribute to the further development of the scale. In this respect, the study is important both in terms of bringing a new PTMAQ to the literature and making suggestions to researchers and academicians who will use this scale in the future.

Due to the necessity of collecting data from a large sample to test the research's hypotheses, the questionnaire was chosen as the data collection instrument. The Physiotherapy Mobile Acceptance Questionnaire (PTMAQ) scale developed by Blumenthal et al. \[6\] was translated into Turkish and used for data collection on the variables of the study. In this scale, it was seen that a total of 8 expressions belonging to the Perceived usefulness (4 expressions) and Perceived ease of use (4 expressions) variables were used by making use of the TAM model to reveal the attitudes of the participants (physiotherapist) that could affect their intentions towards mHealth practice. Then, a question consisting of 4 statements was asked to reveal the effect of these variables on the intention to use of early adopters. Finally, 18 statements were used to measure the effect of intention to use on intention/likelihood to recommend an mHealth tool for specific clinical purposes. Based on the clinical usefulness of MWT, these 18 statements want to determine the probability of physiotherapists recommending MWT to patients based on the clinical usefulness of using MWT in 3 dimensions (gait speed, gait quality and balance, pain/cognitive status). Responses were requested in a 5-point Likert format to the statements in the scale, according to which "1=Strongly Disagree" means "5=Strongly Agree". For the scale adaptation procedure, Blumenthal et al., the creators of the PTMAQ scale, were contacted via email and permission was secured. After that, five academics who had an excellent command on English translated it into Turkish. Attempts were made to establish language validity using the back translation technique. It was translated into the target language by an expert in the field of English, and the similarity was determined by translating it from the target language into English. Consequently, it was determined that the forms created independently in the two languages are comparable. Before conducting field research, a draft questionnaire was administered to forty physiotherapists, who were then interviewed face-to-face about concepts and expressions. In this manner, the potential miscommunication-causing wording errors in the questionnaire were reviewed, and the questionnaire was finalized.