A systematic review of factors influencing the effective use of mHealth apps for self-care

Abstract

mHealth refers to the emerging mobile communications and network technologies for healthcare. With the penetration of smartphones and tablets, many healthcare apps for self-care have been deployed to cater to the needs of mobile healthcare today. This paper systematically reviews the factors influencing the effective use of mHealth apps for self-care. Prominent factors based on their frequencies of occurrence were identified. Related studies found in different databases such as IEEE Xplore, ACM Digital Library, Emerald, and Science Direct were identified for the review. A total of sixty-eight factors were identified and the results show that the following seven factors were seen to appear most frequently: perceived usefulness, perceived ease of use, behavioral intention, social-influence, self-efficacy, perceived privacy risk and attitude. This review will be useful to healthcare application developers in order for them to recognize the factors which might most influence the intention of consumers to leverage on mHealth apps for self-care. © 2016 IEEE.