Extending the Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology for COVID-19 Contact Tracing Application by Malaysian Users

Abstract

The Malaysian government has mobilized its strength to confront the current COVID-19 pandemic and has sought to develop and implement a digital contact tracking application, making it an integral part of the exit strategy from the lockdown. These applications record which users have been near one another. When a user is confirmed with COVID-19, app users who have recently been near this person are notified. The effectiveness of these applications is determined by the users’ willingness to install and use them. Therefore, this research aims at identifying the factors that would stimulate or slow down the adoption of a contact-tracing app. It proposes solutions to mitigate the impact of the factors affecting the user’s acceptance of COVID-19 Digital Contact Tracing Apps. A quantitative approach was followed in this research, where an electronic survey was spread in Malaysia, for the objective of data collection, considering the previous discussion of the results. Then, using PLS-SEM, the collected data were analyzed statistically. The findings of this study indicate that the unified theory of acceptance and use of technology (UTAUT) factors (Performance Expectancy, Effort Expectancy, Social Influence, Facilities Condition) were significant predictors of MySejahtera application adoption among citizens in Malaysia. On the other hand, the factors of app-related privacy concern were found to be insignificant for MySejahtera application adoption.

Factors influencing acceptance of Indonesian contact tracing APP: Development of the technology acceptance model

“…Additionally, social influence played a crucial role since it affected trust and intention with the highest effect compared to other predictors. This result was in line with previous studies in the context of trust (Beldad & Hegner, 2018;Oldeweme et al, 2021) and intention as an outcome (Aggelidis & Chatzoglou, 2009;Alshami et al, 2022;Huang et al, 2022;Oldeweme et al, 2021). Therefore, the surrounding encouragement influences the public's willingness to use the application.…”

“…However, we did not explore the direct effect of privacy on intention. Since some studies found no significant effect of privacy on intention (Abuhammad et al, 2020;Alshami et al, 2022;Kwarteng et al, 2023), the effect might be mediated by attitude, as our study showed. On the other hand, perceived usefulness and perceived ease of use did not strongly impact attitude compared to trust after incorporating them with privacy concerns.…”

“…Hence, the respondents who hold a higher evaluation of the application's usefulness do not necessarily have a greater intention to use the application. Despite contradicting previous studies (Aggelidis & Chatzoglou, 2009;Alshami et al, 2022;Kamal et al, 2020;Kim & Park, 2012;Kurniawati et al, 2020;Tomczyk et al, 2021;Velicia-Martin et al, 2021) and meta-analysis (Holden & Karsh, 2010), the results are the same with those from a study in the context of mobile learning (Park et al, 2012). They argued that the convenience of using the mobile device results in an indirect effect.…”

“…Privacy concerns also was detected to negatively correlate with the other variables (see Table 5). However, users could possibily use the app despite concerning their privacy in order to prioritize their health (Nguyen et al, 2023), as found in Malaysia (Alshami et al, 2022). The proposed path model was reported to have an adequate fit considering the same cutoff as before, as summarized in Table 3.…”

All-People-Test-Based Methods for COVID-19 Infectious Disease Dynamics Simulation Model: Towards Citywide COVID Testing

“…When the penetration rate of tracking applications in a country reaches 70%, the accurate tracking of populations can be achieved [ 21 ]. In Figure 8 , with different app application rates (AAR), the spread rate decreases with the increase of the app application rate.…”