Background: The last decade has witnessed the rapid development of health care conversational agents (CAs); however, there are still great challenges in making health care CAs trustworthy and acceptable to patients. Objective: Focusing on intelligent guidance CAs, a type of health care CA for web-based patient triage, this study aims to investigate how anthropomorphic cues influence patients’ perceived anthropomorphism and social presence of such CAs and evaluate how these perceptions facilitate their trust-building process and acceptance behavior. Methods: To test the research hypotheses, the video vignette methodology was used to evaluate patients’ perceptions and acceptance of various intelligent guidance CAs. The anthropomorphic cues of CAs were manipulated in a 3×2 within-subject factorial experiment with 103 participants, with the factors of agent appearance (high, medium, and low anthropomorphic levels) and verbal cues (humanlike and machine-like verbal cues) as the within-subject variables. Results: The 2-way repeated measures ANOVA analysis indicated that the higher anthropomorphic level of agent appearance significantly increased mindful anthropomorphism (high level>medium level: 4.57 vs 4.27; P=.01; high level>low level: 4.57 vs 4.04; P<.001; medium level>low level: 4.27 vs 4.04; P=.04), mindless anthropomorphism (high level>medium level: 5.39 vs 5.01; P<.001; high level>low level: 5.39 vs 4.85; P<.001), and social presence (high level>medium level: 5.19 vs 4.83; P<.001; high level>low level: 5.19 vs 4.72; P<.001), and the higher anthropomorphic level of verbal cues significantly increased mindful anthropomorphism (4.83 vs 3.76; P<.001), mindless anthropomorphism (5.60 vs 4.57; P<.001), and social presence (5.41 vs 4.41; P<.001). Meanwhile, a significant interaction between agent appearance and verbal cues (.004) was revealed. Second, the partial least squares results indicated that privacy concerns were negatively influenced by social presence (β=−.375; t312=4.494) and mindful anthropomorphism (β=−.112; t312=1.970). Privacy concerns (β=−.273; t312=9.558), social presence (β=.265; t312=4.314), and mindless anthropomorphism (β=.405; t312=7.145) predicted the trust in CAs, which further promoted the intention to disclose information (β=.675; t312=21.163), the intention to continuously use CAs (β=.190; t312=4.874), and satisfaction (β=.818; t312=46.783). Conclusions: The findings show that a high anthropomorphic level of agent appearance and verbal cues could improve the perceptions of mindful anthropomorphism and mindless anthropomorphism as well as social presence. Furthermore, mindless anthropomorphism and social presence significantly promoted patients’ trust in CAs, and mindful anthropomorphism and social presence decreased privacy concerns. It is also worth noting that trust was an important antecedent and determinant of patients’ acceptance of CAs, including their satisfaction, intention to disclose information, and intention to continuously use CAs.

Mobile health (mHealth) services have recently been receiving increasing attention. However, there is a lack of knowledge about how users accept and adopt mobile medical treatment (MMT) services, some of the most promising mHealth services that aim to extend the patient–physician relationship beyond the conventional clinic environment. To fill this research gap, this study proposes a research model for predicting consumers’ acceptance behavior toward MMT services based on the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM). A survey was conducted among 303 Chinese MMT service users to evaluate the proposed model and relevant hypotheses using partial least squares. Several key findings were summarized from the results: (1) the attitude toward using MMT, technology anxiety, and trust are significantly associated with users’ behavioral intention to use MMT services; (2) the perceived ease of use, perceived usefulness, and trust significantly influence users’ attitude toward using MMT services; (3) the perceived interactivity, perceived personalization, and privacy concerns have significant impacts on users’ perceptions of ease of use, usefulness, and trust toward MMT services. The current findings have both theoretical and practical implications that may guide practitioners and researchers to better understand consumers’ acceptance of MMT services.

The interface metaphor was suggested to facilitate a user’s mental model development while navigating, whereas its effectiveness is still unknown among the group of older adults. We developed an experiment to investigate how older adults navigate the mobile interfaces with and without metaphors, by evaluating the possible effects of users’ perceptual speed, task complexity, content similarity, and other related user characteristics in an integrated fashion. Results indicated that the use of interface metaphor could assist in the older adults’ navigation performance, but only for those with a higher level of perceptual speed. Additionally, we found that the older adult’s navigation behavior was significantly influenced by the task complexity, content similarity and the users’ level of technology experience. These findings can help researchers and practitioners to evaluate the effectiveness of interface metaphor on older adults’ mobile navigation behavior by identifying the possible influential factors and interpreting the behind reasons.