JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Background:

The use of mobile health applications (mHealth apps) to manage chronic diseases has increased significantly in recent years. Although mHealth apps have many benefits, their acceptance is still low in certain areas and groups. Most mHealth acceptance studies are based on technology acceptance models. Especially the UTAUT2 model was developed to predict technology acceptance in a consumer context. To date, however, only a few studies have used the UTAUT2 model to predict mHealth acceptance and confirm its suitability for the health sector. Thus, it is unclear whether the UTAUT2 model is suitable for predicting mHealth acceptance and whether essential variables for a health-related context are missing.

Objective:

To validate the suitability of UTAUT2 for predicting mHealth acceptance.

Methods:

Diabetes was used as an example in this study since mHealth applications are a significant element of diabetes self-management. In addition, diabetes is one of the most common chronic diseases affecting young and elderly people worldwide. An explorative literature review and guided interviews with eleven mHealth or technology acceptance experts and eight mHealth users in Austria and Germany were triangulated to identify all relevant constructs for predicting mHealth acceptance. The interview participants were recruited by purposive sampling until theoretical saturation was reached. The data were analyzed using the structured content analysis based on inductive and deductive approaches.

Results:

The study was able to confirm the relevance of all exogenous UTAUT2 constructs. However, the study revealed two additional constructs that may also need to be considered to better predict mHealth acceptance: “trust” and “perceived disease threat”.

Conclusions:

The study showed that the UTAUT2 model is suitable for predicting mHealth acceptance. However, the UTAUT2 model should be extended to include two additional constructs for use in the mHealth context.