Modelling the impact of mHealth service quality on satisfaction,continuance and quality of life

Understanding the impact of service quality on economic and social outcomes is critical to extend the focus of IT service research. This study evaluates the impact of quality on both these dimensions in mHealth using a cross disciplinary approach. The conceptual model is rooted in the traditional cognition–affective–conation chain but explicitly incorporates convenience, confidence, cooperation, care and concern as the primary dimensions of mHealth quality. The model is validated in the context of a business-to-consumer mHealth services using partial least squares path modelling. The results confirm that service quality has both direct and indirect impact on continuance intentions (i.e. economic outcome) and quality of life (i.e. social outcome). In this relationship, satisfaction plays the key mediating role, whereas service quality does not have any moderating effect. Research implications point to scale and sustain this new healthcare paradigm by linking service quality to satisfaction, continuance intentions and quality of life.     

Market development at the bottom of the pyramid: examining the role of information and communication technologies

This paper addresses the research question, “How can the use of information and communication technology (ICT) enable development of markets at the bottom of the pyramid (BOP)?” Integrating ideas centered on the threefold role of ICT (automate–informate–transform), market mechanisms, and agency freedom aspects of ICT-enabled development, we examine how (1) ICT facilitate development of market mechanisms at the BOP, (2) market mechanisms enable economic and social benefit outcomes for BOP markets and members, and (3) complementary conditions facilitate or hinder ICT-enabled market development. The findings are based on qualitative primary data from interviews with 27 BOP individuals from India, and from published and secondary examples. Theoretical contributions and implications for practice and further research are discussed.     

Development and validation of an instrument to measure user perceived service quality of mHealth

The role of service quality in fostering the growth of mHealth services has gained much attention in the academic and practitioner communities. However, empirical research in this area has been beset by inadequate conceptualization and the lack of a validated scale. This study addresses these limitations by theoretically conceptualizing and empirically validating a multidimensional service quality scale in the mHealth context. The findings show that mHealth service quality is a hierarchical, multidimensional, and reflective construct, which consists of three primary dimensions and eight subdimensions. The results also confirm that the mHealth service quality scale is more effective at predicting satisfaction and continuance in a nomological network.     

Distinguishing the effects of B2B information quality,system quality,and service outcome quality on trust and distrust

Successful business-to-business (B2B) data exchanges can help firms improve inter-organizational cooperation and operational practices, thereby increasing competitive advantage. However, data exchange quality and trust are not assured. Further, although researchers have examined how trust in the exchange partner relates to data exchange system success, both trust and distrust may be important to consider. Using two-factor theory and trust theory, we examine the differential impacts of information quality, system quality, and service outcome quality on trusting and distrusting beliefs. We also study whether trusting and distrusting beliefs have differential influences on relationship commitment and perceived risk. Results from a laboratory experiment show that information quality, a process (i.e., motivating) factor, more strongly influences trusting beliefs than distrusting beliefs, whereas service outcome quality, an outcome (i.e., hygiene) factor, more strongly influences distrusting beliefs. Also, while trusting beliefs has a significantly stronger influence on relationship commitment, trusting and distrusting beliefs have equivalent effects on perceived risk. Implications and ways to expand this research are discussed.     

An adaptive quality of service aware middleware for replicated services

A dependable middleware should be able to adaptively share the distributed resources it manages in order to meet diverse application requirements, even when the quality of service (QoS) is degraded due to uncertain variations in load and unanticipated failures. We have addressed this issue in the context of a dependable middleware that adaptively manages replicated servers to deliver a timely and consistent response to time-sensitive client applications. These applications have specific temporal and consistency requirements, and can tolerate a certain degree of relaxed consistency in exchange for better response time. We propose a flexible QoS model that allows clients to specify their timeliness and consistency constraints. We also propose an adaptive framework that dynamically selects replicas to service a client's request based on the prediction made by probabilistic models. These models use the feedback from online performance monitoring of the replicas to provide probabilistic guarantees for meeting a client's QoS specification. The experimental results we have obtained demonstrate the role of feedback and the efficacy of simple analytical models for adaptively sharing the available replicas among the users under different workload scenarios.     

Bootstrapping trust of Web services based on trust patterns and Hidden Markov Models

We propose in this paper a new approach for bootstrapping trust of Web services in which the interactions of a Web service with a user are observed during a certain time frame. The observations sequence is modeled as a Hidden Markov Model and matched against pre-defined trust patterns in order to assess the behavior of such Web service. The pre-defined trust patterns are specifications of possible behaviors of Web services such as trusted, malicious, betraying, oscillating, and redemptive. Based on the matching result, an initial trust value is assigned to the Web service. Our experimental results show that our approach enjoys good precision and recall values and provides a fair distribution of trust values. Besides, the proposed approach is applied on a dataset of real-world Web services. A comparative study with published bootstrapping approaches shows a better bootstrapping success rate for our new approach.     

Using a cloud-centric middleware to enable mobile hosting of Web services: mHealth use case

The unceasing growth and divergence of the mobile landscape have led to the use of smartphone and tablet devices in consuming Web services (WS) in enterprises. However, in heterogeneous WS, the shift from the mobile client consumer approach to the mobile service hosting approach is insufficiently studied. With the advancement of storage and processing capabilities of these devices, coupled with the high availability of the Web, this research focuses on the use of the mobile devices as hosts of WS in a mHealth domain. In this paper, a cloud-centric middleware technique is employed to enable access to the mobile hosts. The paper presents mobile hosting of medical data which are modeled as light-weight WS which is deployed in a real-world system. Further, a workflow authorization model is proposed to ensure privacy and the prevention of unauthorized modification of data on the mobile hosts. A data encryption technique is also put forward to enforce security and privacy of the mobile hosted data. Our current implemented project, called SOPHRA, supports mobile communication over HTTP in a Wi-Fi environment.     

Antecedents of application service continuance: A synthesis of satisfaction and trust

Although ASP (Application Service Provider) has the potential to fundamentally change the manner in which IT services are provided for user firms, current ASPs often fail to provide good results in accumulating and retaining customers. To fill the gap between the expected benefits of application service and its disappointing results in the real world, we present a conceptual model including three quality measures – System Quality, Information Quality, and Service Quality. To extend the horizons of ASP acceptance, this study sharpens the model that these quality measures regulate Satisfaction and Trust, which lead to Continuance Intention. We test the research model and hypotheses through the use of the data from 203 small and medium enterprises with application service experience. Data analysis results using LISREL reveal that Satisfaction and Trust have significant effects on a client firm’s Continuance Intention. Trust is found to be the most salient determinant while previous studies mainly focused on the role of Satisfaction. Furthermore, an empirical support is found for the direct effect of Service Quality on Continuance Intention as well as its mediating effects.     

Access control and trust in the use of widely distributed services

OASIS is a role‐based access control (RBAC) architecture for achieving secure interoperation of independently managed services in an open, distributed environment. OASIS differs from other RBAC schemes in a number of ways: role management is decentralized, roles are parametrized, roles are activated within sessions and privileges are not delegated. OASIS depends on an active middleware platform to notify services of any relevant changes in their environment. Services define roles and establish formally specified policy for role activation and service use (authorization); users must present the required credentials and satisfy specified constraints in order to activate a role or invoke a service. The membership rule of a role indicates which of the role activation conditions must remain true while the role is active. A role is deactivated immediately if any of the conditions of the membership rule associated with its activation become false. OASIS introduces the notion of appointment, whereby being active in certain roles carries the privilege of issuing appointment certificates to other users. Appointment certificates capture the notion of long‐lived credentials such as academic and professional qualification or membership of an organization. The role activation conditions of a service may include appointment certificates, prerequisite roles and environmental constraints. The role activation and authorization policies of services within an administrative domain need not embody role hierarchies nor enforce privilege delegation. But OASIS is sufficiently flexible to capture such notions, through prerequisite roles and appointments, if they are required within an application domain. We define the model and architecture and discuss engineering details, including security issues. We illustrate how an OASIS session can span multiple domains and we propose a minimal infrastructure to enable widely distributed, independently developed services to enter into agreements to respect each other's credentials. In a multi‐domain system access control policy may come from multiple sources and must be expressed, enforced and managed. In order to respond to changing relationships between organizations it should be easy to allow role holders in one domain to obtain privileges in another. Our approach to policy and meta‐policy management is described. We speculate on a further extension to mutually unknown, and therefore untrusted, parties. Each party will accumulate audit certificates which embody its interaction history and which may form the basis of a web of trust. Copyright © 2003 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Service quality of mHealth platforms: development and validation of a hierarchical model using PLS

Advancing research on service quality requires clarifying the theoretical conceptualizations and validating an integrated service quality model. The purpose of this study is to facilitate and elucidate practical issues and decisions related to the development of a hierarchical service quality model in mobile health (mHealth) services research. Conceptually, it extends theory by reframing service quality as a reflective, hierarchical construct and modeling its impact on satisfaction, intention to continue using and quality of life. Empirically, it confirms that PLS path modeling can be used to estimate the parameters of a higher order construct and its association with subsequent consequential latent variables in a nomological network. The findings of the study show that service quality is the third-order, reflective construct model with strong positive effects on satisfaction, continuance intentions and quality of life in the context of mHealth services. Finally, the study discusses the implications of hierarchical service quality modeling in electronic markets and highlights future research directions.     

Taking value-networks to the cloud services: security services, semantics and service level agreements

Cloud services have become an emerging solution for organizations striving to address today’s need for agility, but little research has addressed transitioning multiple, collaborating organizations to what can be referred to as a “value-network cloud.” We know that organizations adopting cloud services to execute business processes must concomitantly reconfigure their security solutions for their integrated intra- and inter-organizational collaborations. We address the question, “What is needed to make it possible for an entire value-network to take secure, collaborative business process executions to the cloud?” Future value-network cloud solutions will require completely new security approaches that will leverage contracted brokering solutions operating as part of the cloud solution. We view value-network cloud security service provisioning as a bundle decision characterized by a mix of communication patterns relevant to intra- and inter-enterprise collaboration. We propose a cloud service broker model—using semantics and SLA based middleware—to serve as a trusted interface between the enterprise, cloud service providers and other organizations collaborating in a value-network. The approach enables IT governance for value-network cloud services. The architectural requirements adapt design principles for infrastructure management tailored from approaches to how business cartels historically conducted secure business dealings.     

The relationship between website quality,trust and price premiums at online auctions

This study measures the value of website quality in terms of its impact on trust, intention to transact and price premiums. Prior research on online auctions has focused on the use of reputation systems for building trust in online auction vendors and subsequently to generate price premiums. This study examines the extent to which trust can be induced by improving the quality of online auction listings. A survey of 701 eBay users is conducted which compares the price premiums of two nearly identical online auction businesses, one that has online auction listings with a perceived high quality and the other that has substantially lower perceived quality. Results of this study indicate that website quality can explain 49% of the variation in the trust for eBay sellers. In fact, it shows that sellers with good website quality are all perceived to be equally trustworthy regardless of their eBay reputation; whereas sellers with poor website quality are not perceived to be trustworthy even if they have a high eBay reputation score. The results also show that the trust resulting from increased website quality increases intention to transact and results in price premiums of 12% (on average) for sellers with higher quality listings. Theories from marketing, economics, and social psychology are used to explain why website quality induces trust in unknown vendors without providing any concrete evidence regarding the vendor’s past history.     

Certification of eIDAS trust services and new global transparency trends

Trust services form the core of the digital trust space as initiated by the eIDAS Regulation which came into effect throughout the EU in summer 2017. We will discuss various ways of demonstrating trust in these services and we will examine certain global trends that are relevant for this area.     

Control of perceived quality of service in multimedia retrieval services: prediction-based mechanism vs. compensation buffers

In multimedia systems end-to-end delay jitter has a great impact on the continuity of information playback. Therefore, it is necessary to introduce appropriate mechanisms to compensate for delay variations, so that the intramedia and intermedia temporal relationships can be preserved. In this paper, two methods for compensation of the network delay jitter in a distributed multimedia retrieval service are compared: the first is based on prediction of the network delay jitter suffered by each information unit and retrieval time modification at the source site; the second is based on a compensation buffer at the destination site. Comparison is made by assuming a master/slave relationship between the monomedia streams composing the multimedia data flow.     

M‐payment service: Interplay of perceived risk,benefit, and trust in service adoption

This study aimed to examine the effects of perceived risk, perceived benefits, and trust on consumers’ intention to use mobile payment, or m‐payment. In addition, different effects of some demographic factors (e.g., income, age, education) on m‐payment usage were examined. The sample of 457 respondents was used to analyze the causal relationships between the variables and the mean differences of demographic factors in consumer intention to use m‐payment. The results supported the negative relationship between perceived risk, trust, and consumer intention to use m‐payment. A positive relationship between perceived benefits and trust was found. This study revealed that trust mediated consumer intention to use m‐payment. In individual differences of m‐payment adoption, education influenced the relationship between perceived risk and intention to use m‐payments as well as the relationship between trust and intention to use m‐payment. This study provided insights into consumer differences regarding m‐payment adoption and the mediating role of trust between perceived benefits, perceived risk, and intention to use m‐payment.     

Denial of service attacks and defenses in decentralized trust management

Trust management is an approach to scalable and flexible access control in decentralized systems. In trust management, a server often needs to evaluate a chain of credentials submitted by a client; this requires the server to perform multiple expensive digital signature verifications. In this paper, we study low-bandwidth Denial-of-Service (DoS) attacks that exploit the existence of trust management systems to deplete server resources. Although the threat of DoS attacks has been studied for some application-level protocols such as authentication protocols, we show that it is especially destructive for trust management systems. Exploiting the delegation feature in trust management languages, an attacker can forge a long credential chain to force a server to consume a large amount of computing resource. Using game theory as an analytic tool, we demonstrate that unprotected trust management servers will easily fall prey to a witty attacker who moves smartly. We report our empirical study of existing trust management systems, which manifests the gravity of this threat. We also propose a defense technique using credential caching, and show that it is effective in the presence of intelligent attackers. A preliminary version of this paper was presented at the Second IEEE International Conference on Security and Privacy in Communication Networks, Baltimore, MD, USA, August 2006.     

Understanding trust in ms-commerce: The roles of reported experience,linguistic style,profile photo,emotional, and cognitive trust

This paper examines what influences trust in mobile social commerce environment. Drawing on trust-based acceptance model (i.e. cognitive and emotional trust) and online review features (i.e. profile photo, linguistic style, and reported experience), we examine how these factors affect trust in mobile social commerce. Hypotheses were tested using survey data. The results of our model showed that there are significant influences of profile photo, reported experience, cognitive, and emotional trust towards trust in ms-commerce. This work contributes to existing literature by examining the roles of previous trust in mobile payments and online reviews on trust in mobile social commerce.     

How to identify the trends of services: GTM-TT service map

Recently, due to the explosive increase of services, firms have faced with challenges to analyze patterns and trends in services in an intuitive but objective ways. The notion of service map can be adapted to this end. Maps, in general, have been receiving a great deal of attention because of their potential as visualization tools that can allow people to visualize massive amounts of information. Specifically, the generative topographic mapping through time (GTM-TT) algorithm is suitable for dynamic analysis since GTM-TT provides a time-based clustering and change path. In response, this study proposes an approach for developing and using GTM-TT service maps consisting of a service clustering map and a service sequence map for analyzing service trends. The proposed approach, broadly, is comprised of four steps: (1) the construction of a database, (2) data preprocessing, (3) development of a GTM-TT service map, and (4) interpretation. The proposed approach is expected to aid in the identification of dynamic service trends.     

Government website service quality: a study of the Irish revenue online service

Online taxation systems have been among the most successful of e-government applications both in terms of citizen take-up and savings to the taxpayer. Understanding the factors that lead to high take-up is of potential interest to other public sector online service providers. This paper examines the quality of the online service provided by the Irish Revenue Commissioners’ tax filing and collection system, Revenue Online Service (ROS). A modified version of the recently operationalized E-S-QUAL instrument is used to examine online service quality from the point of view of the citizens and tax practitioners who use this eGovernment system. The findings show that efficiency and ease of completion are the dimensions of website service quality that most influence ROS users’ perceptions of value and convenience as well as their intentions to use and recommend the website to their peers. The practical implications of these findings include the fact that providers of public sector e-services should concentrate on communicating the functionality of their e-services. In addition, they should focus on reducing citizen concerns regarding misuse or mismanagement of personal data.     

Casting for service innovation: The roles of frontline employees

The purpose of this paper is to explore the roles of frontline employees (FLEs) in service innovation processes and how they contribute to these roles. In the literature, FLEs are argued to play an important role in service innovation; however, neither the potential types of roles nor what taking on these potential roles means to FLEs, have previously been studied. This study investigates FLEs' actions in different types of service innovation processes. Based on analyses of eight different service business units, FLEs are identified as having either of two sets of roles: (1) leading roles as idea creators, developers and implementers, or (2) supporting roles as problem reporters, advisors and executors. The analysis provides managers with guidelines which can help them to better utilize FLEs as contributors to service innovation, either as leading or supporting actors. These imply different management challenges, which are discussed. Advice on how to tackle these challenges is given on the basis of the findings.