Identification of external variables for the Technology Acceptance Model(TAM) in the assessment of BIM application for mobile devices

Abstract

With the development of information and communication technology (ICT), various tools designed to utilize the ubiquity of portable devices have been launched. This is also true within the construction industry, where many such tools seek to enhance work efficiency by utilizing ICT and to transform PC-based environments into mobile-based environments to enhance the convenience of use. In accordance with this trend, building information modeling (BIM) has now been extended to portable devices. A number of BIM tools are currently available, such as Formit (provided by Autodesk), BIMx (Graphisoft) and BIMsight (Tekla); however, they are limited to model-related functions such as viewer and model modification. Recently, additional functions such as communication and cloud-based information sharing have been developed, but user-oriented demand research using tools are not yet available. Therefore, based on a literature review, this study summarizes the external variables which affect the use of BIM application tools and describes the expected effects when the relationships between these variables are hypothesized and verified using the technology acceptance model. This study contributes to the development of user-oriented BIM utilization tools for portable devices.