Previously submitted to: JMIR Formative Research (no longer under consideration since Mar 19, 2025)
Date Submitted: Dec 23, 2023
Warning: This is an author submission that is not peer-reviewed or edited. Preprints - unless they show as "accepted" - should not be relied on to guide clinical practice or health-related behavior and should not be reported in news media as established information.
The Adoption of Mobile Health Apps for Maternal and Infant Health: A Theoretical Model and Survey Study
ABSTRACT
Background:
Background:
Electronic health (eHealth) offers majority opportunities in supporting health care, and has received a great deal of attention in the domain of health-related studies. Yet, only a fraction of these studies focuses on what kinds of variables explain the adoption of eHealth among maternal, making their subjective evaluation an underestimated field. This research will address this gap by investigating the acceptance of mobile health services from maternal point of view.
Objective:
Objective:
The aim of this study was to explore what factors influence maternal intentions to use a mobile health application (App) service based on the Venkatesh’s unified theory of acceptance and use of technology 2 (UTAUT2).
Methods:
Methods:
Participants were recruited from October 2020 to March 2021 in the obstetrics and gynecology department of 2 hospitals in Shenzhen. The variables included sociodemographic variables and the mHealth adoption gradient. To explore determinants of intention to use mHealth apps, a new measure based on the UTAUT2 was adapted with 4 key determinants (perceived ease of use, perceived usefulness, social influence, and perceived risk) and extended by electronic health literacy (e-HEALS) and Individual innovation and creativity (IC). To test this model, we applied partial least squares (PLS) path modeling with AMOS software. A total of 323 valid questionnaires were analyzed.
Results:
Results:
The suggested eHealth adoption model yielded a high model fit. We found that e-HEALS and IC were significant predictors of usage intention (UI). The moderation analysis revealed that perceived ease of use (PEOU), perceived usefulness (PU), social influence (SI) and perceived risk (PR) were all significantly affected both e-HEALS and IC. The study also confirmed the positive relationship between e-HEALS and IC.
Conclusions:
Conclusions:
This study developed a theoretical model to predict pregnant or postpartum women’s acceptance of mHealth technology for health management. Important factors that contribute to the usage of a mHealth App were identified. The findings of our study are important for creators of mHealth Apps because they can help tailor mHealth Apps to the mothers’ needs and characteristics. Also, this study provides important insights about the variables that affect the acceptance of Apps for other researchers.
Citation
Request queued. Please wait while the file is being generated. It may take some time.
Copyright
© The authors. All rights reserved. This is a privileged document currently under peer-review/community review (or an accepted/rejected manuscript). Authors have provided JMIR Publications with an exclusive license to publish this preprint on it's website for review and ahead-of-print citation purposes only. While the final peer-reviewed paper may be licensed under a cc-by license on publication, at this stage authors and publisher expressively prohibit redistribution of this draft paper other than for review purposes.