Revista Internacional de Economia e Ciências de Gestão

Chinese Consumers’ Perceptions of Medical Emergency Identification Systems

Abstract

Richard Law and Krishna Govender

The paper explored Chinese consumers’ behavior with specific focus on categories of “mass consumers” and “new mainstream consumers” who together constitute the vast majority of consumers, using an online questionnaire hosted on a Chinese survey website called "So jump" was used. Through email and social networking, personal requests were sent to known associates across the six strata of the Chinese populations to complete the online questionnaire as well as forward it to their extended networks. It became evident that the consumers have extremely low levels of knowledge about MEISs; they ranked the best method of storing MEIS data as “database storage” such as a cloud service that was managed by an emergency Call Centre operation, followed by “personal portable electronic storage”, and then “printed format.” An overwhelming majority of the respondents believed that a MEIS would offer considerable benefit to their families in an emergency.