The Effects of Human Factors on the Acceptance of Healthcare 4.0 Transformation

Healthcare services and healthcare related systems are increasingly adopting technological solutions to digitalize the industry and move towards a comprehensive Healthcare 4.0 infrastructure and services.Their main goals of doing so include reducing costs, improving care and access to it, optimizing operations, and enhancing patient satisfaction.In the meantime, research and development in the field proposed many innovative frameworks, applications, and techniques to fully transform the healthcare industry into Healthcare 4.0.Yet, many remain in the research, design or at most at the trial phases and very few make it mainstream utilization.Adopting and moving to Healthcare 4.0 face various challenges.Some of these are technical, many of which will be resolved over time.Others are financial, which can be addressed, somehow.Yet, there are other obstacles hindering the efforts that are proving to be very hard to address, these are the social and human acceptance challenges.When considering the introduction of smart systems in healthcare, we must keep in mind the invasive nature of smart healthcare 4.0 applications.This means that we need humans to accept their existence and invasive behavior and trust them to keep them safe and protect their information.In addition, the general perception is that smart systems will eventually replace human workers, which leads to two main problems, the fear of job losses among the healthcare workers, and the danger of losing the human touch and connections between the workers and the patients.In this paper, we review the different human factors and challenges of accepting healthcare 4.0 and smart applications in the healthcare sector.We will study some of the current work in the field discussing the adoption and acceptance of such systems.We will also discuss the challenges and possible approaches to address them and increase the acceptance levels of embracing Healthcare 4.0.