JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Background:

Mobile Mental Health Systems (MMHS) have been increasingly developed and deployed in support of monitoring, management, and intervention of patients with mental disorders. However, many of them rely on patient data collected by smartphones and/or other wearable devices to infer patients’ mental status, which raises privacy concerns. Such a value-privacy paradox poses significant challenges to patients’ adoption and use of MMHS, yet there has been limited understanding of it.

Objective:

To address the significant literature gap, this research investigates both the antecedents of patients’ privacy concerns and the effects of privacy concerns on their continuous usage intention of mobile mental health systems.

Methods:

Using an online survey, this research collects data from 170 participants with MHHS experience recruited from online mental health communities and the university community. The data analyses use both repeated ANOVA and partial least square regression.

Results:

Results show that data type (P<.01), data stage (P<.01), privacy victimization experience (P<.05) and privacy awareness (P<.1) have positive effects on privacy concerns. Specifically, users report higher privacy concerns for social interaction (P<.01) and self-reported data (P<.01) than biometrics (P<.01) and device usage data (P<.05); privacy concerns are higher about data transmission (P<.05) and sharing (P<.001) than data collection and storage stages. Our results also reveal that privacy concerns have an effect on attitude toward privacy protection (P<.01), which in turn affects the continuous usage intention of MMHS.

Conclusions:

This study contributes to the literature by deepening our understanding of the data value-privacy paradox in the MMHS research. The findings offer practical guides for breaking the paradox through the design of user-centered, privacy-protecting MMHS.