How to Make Health Information Technology Effective: The Challenge of Patient Engagement

Here we suggest that the emerging discipline of positive psychology with its focus on personal experience2 provides a useful framework for guiding these efforts. In this view, patient engagement can be conceptualized as a subjective experiential process resulting from the conjoint conative (act), cognitive (think), and emotional (feel) enactment of individuals in care and cure management (fig 1). This process consists of 4 subsequent phases (disengagement, arousal, adhesion, and eudaimonic reconfiguration) in which the different experiential dimensions play complementary driving roles as key factors for promoting patients’ advancement in this process. The unachieved synergy among these dimensions inhibits patients from full engagement in their care process, limiting the benefit from robotic-assisted rehabilitation.