Determinants of mHealth success: An empirical investigation of the user perspective

Mobile health (mHealth) applications have become an important tool to support public health, especially in times of increased health awareness in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic. However, there is still uncertainty about what factors determine successful mHealth services from the users’ perspective. Based on the results of a systematic literature review, a qualitative content analysis of available apps and semi-structured user and expert interviews, we derive a structural model with antecedents on user attitudes towards mHealth and user satisfaction with the mHealth application. These variables determine users’ intention to continue using the application and their intention to recommend it to others. For verification, we tested the model with a sample of 249 German mHealth users from the “MyFitnessPal” community using structural equation modelling and found that all derived path relations have significant coefficients.