Where there’s sugar, there are sugar-related mobile apps. What factors motivate consumers’ continued use of m-Health?

Abstract

The adoption of mobile health (m-Health) applications (apps) has been widely studied, but its continuance has not. This study endeavors to address this gap by examining the factors that motivate the continued use of m-Health using consumers of sugar-related mobile apps in Australia as a case. To do so, this study extrapolates the technology acceptance model for technology adoption to explain the technology continuance of m-Health by adapting and extending its associated tenets informed by prior literature. This study also performs structural equation modeling on a sample of 306 usable responses from a randomly crowdsource online survey of sugar-related mobile app users in Australia. In doing so, this study finds that consumers’ continuance intention of m-Health apps is driven primarily by the ease of using and social influence toward such apps. Upon further scrutiny, this study observes that the influence of usefulness and enjoyment of such apps on continuance intention is fully mediated and thus manifests indirectly through the usage habits shaped by the ease of m-Health app usage. The implications of the findings for theory and practice and the limitations of and future research directions from the study conclude the paper.