Acceptance of Wearable Technology: A Meta-Analysis

Knowing what factors drive wearable technology adoption can help companies succeed in the competitive market of wearables. In this study, we conduct a meta-analysis on the relationships of technology acceptance of wearable technology based on the extant corpus (142 effect sizes from 44 samples collected in 11 countries). The results confirm the basic expectation that the core constructs of technology acceptance models as well as reveal that perceived enjoyment and usefulness are the most important to the adoption of wearables. However, more interestingly, a granular analysis of moderating effects shows that cultural factors including uncertainty avoidance, future orientation and humane orientation can significantly moderate the relationships between different determinants and wearable adoption. In addition, compared with other types of smart wearables, the users of smartwatches would place more weight on perceived self-expressiveness. These findings offer insights for future wearables-related research and also have practical implications for designing and developing successful wearable products.