Healthcare Informatics & Health Information Technology (SIG Health)
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Paper Type
ERF
Paper Number
1348
Description
Wellness mHealth apps are applications that guide and motivate users to form healthy habits, such as walking, to improve their health and well-being. However, such improvements require long-term engagement, which is found to be rare as many users discontinue these activities after a short period. This creates an opportunity for research to investigate factors impacting users’ engagement with these apps. Studies have discovered technical problems, acceptance obstacles, and design preferences can impact user engagement. Literature on social media use reports that fulfillment of users’ psychological needs is an affordance of the technology and could lead to long term engagement. This study investigates whether this phenomenon holds for wellness apps given that humans’ goals drive their actions toward the fulfillment of psychological needs. This study will apply affordance theory and five human motivation theories, following a qualitative approach. It aims to uncover wellness apps’ affordances related to fulfillment of psychological needs.
Recommended Citation
Alshawmar, Moayad and Tulu, Bengisu, "Wellness mHealth Apps’ Features, Affordances, and Fulfillment of Human Psychological Needs" (2021). AMCIS 2021 Proceedings. 9.
https://aisel.aisnet.org/amcis2021/healthcare_it/sig_health/9
Wellness mHealth Apps’ Features, Affordances, and Fulfillment of Human Psychological Needs
Wellness mHealth apps are applications that guide and motivate users to form healthy habits, such as walking, to improve their health and well-being. However, such improvements require long-term engagement, which is found to be rare as many users discontinue these activities after a short period. This creates an opportunity for research to investigate factors impacting users’ engagement with these apps. Studies have discovered technical problems, acceptance obstacles, and design preferences can impact user engagement. Literature on social media use reports that fulfillment of users’ psychological needs is an affordance of the technology and could lead to long term engagement. This study investigates whether this phenomenon holds for wellness apps given that humans’ goals drive their actions toward the fulfillment of psychological needs. This study will apply affordance theory and five human motivation theories, following a qualitative approach. It aims to uncover wellness apps’ affordances related to fulfillment of psychological needs.
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