Accepted for/Published in: Journal of Medical Internet Research
Date Submitted: Sep 1, 2025
Open Peer Review Period: Sep 1, 2025 - Oct 27, 2025
Date Accepted: Jan 15, 2026
(closed for review but you can still tweet)
Perspectives Regarding the Privacy, Security, and Confidentiality of Data Collected via mHealth Apps in Saudi Arabia: A Qualitative Analysis
ABSTRACT
Background:
As Saudi Arabia aims to enhance the adoption and utilisation of mHealth apps in the healthcare sector, it is vital to identify the potential challenges that may be faced in the process and how to address them.
Objective:
This study explored patients' and stakeholders’ perspectives regarding the privacy, security, and confidentiality of data collected via mHealth Apps in Saudi Arabia.
Methods:
A cross-sectional and qualitative research design was employed by conducting an in-depth interview with 25 participants, comprising healthcare workers (HCWs), patients and mHealth app developers. The interview questions focused on awareness of mHealth apps and issues relating to data security, privacy, and confidentiality, benefits of mHealth apps, challenges faced, and features that may improve the utilisation of such digital health technologies. Thematic analysis was performed using NVivo version 12. Resultantly, patients were relatively less informed regarding events associated with data privacy and security compared to HCWs.
Results:
Specific factors were identified to influence patient awareness with HCWs, suggesting the need for patient education and collaboration with cyber security organisations. Participants posited that advanced security features, user-friendly features, online consultation for emergencies, remote monitoring features, and taking patient needs into account are important facilitators of mHealth apps. Shared experiences mainly evolved around the accessibility to information and reliability of mHealth apps while the challenges were related to poor usability, technical difficulties, data security and data breaches. Patient autonomy, remote monitoring, self-care management, medical adherence, and time and cost-saving summed up the perceived benefits of the mHealth app.
Conclusions:
These findings may assist policymakers in developing strategies to improve Saudi users'/patients' adoption of mHealth apps and address the concerns raised to benefit significantly from these advanced healthcare modalities.
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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.