Advice from a Doctor or AI? Understanding Willingness to Disclose Information Through Remote Patient Monitoring to Receive Health Advice

Remote Patient Monitoring (RPM) devices transmit patients' medical indicators (e.g., blood pressure) from the patient's home testing equipment to their healthcare providers, in order to monitor chronic conditions such as hypertension. AI systems have the potential to enhance access to timely medical advice based on the data that RPM devices produce. In this paper, we report on three studies investigating how the severity of users' medical condition (normal vs. high blood pressure), security risk (low vs. modest vs. high risk), and medical advice source (human doctor vs. AI) influence user perceptions of advisor trustworthiness and willingness to disclose RPM-acquired information. We found that trust mediated the relationship between the advice source and users' willingness to disclose health information: users trust doctors more than AI and are more willing to disclose their RPM-acquired health information to a more trusted advice source. However, we unexpectedly discovered that conditional on trust, users disclose RPM-acquired information more readily to AI than to doctors. We observed that the advice source did not influence perceptions of security and privacy risks. We conclude by discussing how our findings can support the design of RPM applications.