JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Background:

Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, an increased need for novel solutions like digital contact tracing apps to mitigate the virus's spread became apparent. These apps have the potential to enhance public health initiatives through timely contact tracing and infection rate reduction. However, public and academic scrutiny has emerged around the adoption and utility of these apps due to privacy concerns.

Objective:

This study aims to investigate public attitudes and preferences for contact tracing apps, especially in Japan, using conjoint analysis to examine what specifications the public values most in such apps. By offering a nuanced understanding of the values that citizens prioritize, this study can help balance public health benefits and data privacy standards when designing contact tracing apps, which could serve as crucial data for discussions on legal development and social consensus formation in future.

Methods:

A cross-sectional online questionnaire survey is conducted to determine how various factors related to the development and integration of infectious disease apps affect the public's intention to use such apps. Five hundred samples from each randomly selected group are received anonymously by the survey company and used as target data. All respondents are asked to indicate their preferences for a combination of basic attributes and infectious disease application features for conjoint analysis. The respondents are randomly divided into two groups: one responds to a scenario in which the government was assumed to be the entity dealing with infectious disease applications (i.e., the government cluster), and the other in which a commercial company was assumed to be this entity (i.e., the business cluster).

Results:

For the government cluster, the most important attribute in Scenario A was for distributor rights (42.557), followed by public benefits (29.458), personal health benefits (22.725), and profit sharing (5.260). For the business cluster, the most important attribute was distributor rights (45.870), followed by public benefits (32.896), personal health benefits (13.994), and profit sharing (7.240). Hence, personal health benefits tend to be more important in encouraging active app use than personal financial benefits. However, the factor that increased motivation for app use the most was public health benefits of cutting infections by half. Further, concern about use of personal data collected by the app for any secondary purpose was a negative incentive, which was even more significant toward app use than the other three factors.

Conclusions:

Our findings suggest that potential app users are positively motivated not only by personal health benefits, but also by contributing to public health. Thus, a combined approach can be taken to increase app use. Clinical Trial: This study was reviewed and approved by the Biomedical Research Ethics Committee of the National Hospital Organization Tokyo Medical Center on September 5, 2022 (Approval number R22-051).