Lay individuals' perceptions of artificial intelligence (AI)-empowered healthcare systems

With the recent advances in Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology, patient-facing applications have started embodying this novel technology to deliver timely healthcare information and services to the patient. However, little is known about lay individuals' perceptions and acceptance of AI-driven, patient-facing health systems. In this study, we conducted a survey with 203 participants to investigate their perceptions about using AI to consult information related to their diagnostic results and what factors influence their perceptions. Our results showed that despite the awareness and experience of patient-facing AI systems being low amongst our participants, people had a generally positive attitude towards such systems. A majority of participants indicated a high level of comfortability and willingness to use health AI systems, and agreed AI could help them comprehend diagnostic results. Several intrinsic factors, such as education background and technology literacy, play an important role in people's perceptions of using AI to comprehend diagnostic results. In particular, people with high technology and health literacy, and education levels had more experiences with using AI and tended to trust AI outputs. We conclude this paper by discussing the implications of this work, with an emphasis on enhancing the trustworthiness of AI and bridging the digital divide. © 2020, John Wiley and Sons Inc. All rights reserved.