Network Diffusion and Technology Acceptance of A Nurse Chatbot for Chronic Disease Self-Management Support : A Theoretical Perspective

Telenursing is one type of telehealth service delivery proposed to resolve the predicted gap between healthcare workforce demand and supply globally. The aim of this article is to explore the ‘Nurse Chatbot' for chronic care on the benefits of increasing patient/client access to healthcare information and maximizing the potential of artificial intelligence/AI to bridge the ‘demand-supply gap' of human healthcare providers. Moreover, closing this gap through the establishment of a ‘Nurse Chatbot' will be innovative, favorably scalable and customizable within a decentralized health network, and potentially sustainable in the new digital economy. Following are the assumptions : 1) “caring” communicated textually is highly ‘transactive' in chronic disease self-management support/CDSMS for goal agreements between agents and for overcoming the system noise in the form of cross-entropy, perplexity, and information wastage ; 2) ‘Nurse Chatbot' is the interlocutor in nursing care and the nursing agency by superpositioning and entanglement ; and 3) possible effects of chatbot-user transactions are information flows, management of health, and patient satisfaction. This article also looks into ‘Nurse Chatbot' development for CDSMS, simulation of its diffusion capacity egocentrically, technology acceptance model/TAM to inquire the engagement of users, and possible approaches to ethical and safety issues.