Mobile Health Apps and Health Management Behaviors: Cost-Benefit Modeling Analysis
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: Rising criticism about the risks associated with the use of mobile health apps necessitates a critical perspective to assess the use of these apps. A cost-benefit approach involving several moderating factors can be used to detect technology effects and individual-level push and pull factors related to health attitudes, lifestyle, and health management behaviors. OBJECTIVE: We introduce a cost-benefit perspective to examine how health attitudes related to mobile health apps and health situational factors (health crises, health changes, and hospitalization) affect the likelihood of adopting lifestyle and health management behaviors among app users. METHODS: The analysis is based on individuals' reported use of mobile health apps. The sample included 1495 US adults aged over 18 years who were contacted by landline or cellphone. A total of 50.96% (762/1495) of the participants were women. A set of logistic regression models was used to predict lifestyle and health management behaviors among users considering variations in the extent of use, health attitudes, health situation, and socioeconomic characteristics. RESULTS: The findings indicate that the proposed models were reasonably adequate. In all, 88.76% (1327/1495) of the cases were correctly classified regarding lifestyle behaviors, but only 71.97% (1076/1495) of the cases were correctly classified regarding health management behaviors. Although a large percentage of individuals changed their attitudes following the use of mobile health apps, only a small proportion adopted health management behaviors. The use of mobile health apps affected up to 67.95% (1016/1495) of the users for consultation and 71.97% (1076/1495) of the users for decision making. The model was effective for 88.76% (1327/1495) of the cases regarding lifestyle behaviors but only 71.97% (1076/1495) regarding health management behaviors. The moderating effect of regular use of mobile health apps significantly affects lifestyle (Wald=61.795; B=2.099; P<.005) but not health management behaviors (Wald=12.532; B=0.513; P=.01). These results collectively indicate that the use of mobile health apps for health management is partially effective. CONCLUSIONS: The use of mobile health apps is a main route to instigate the process of health empowerment and shape health attitudes. However, an accurate assessment of the effectiveness of mobile health apps necessitates distinguishing between lifestyle and health management behaviors and adopting a cost-benefit approach because individuals facing health concerns, such as a chronic disease, health emergency, health crisis, or health change, consider their affordances and situational effects. These moderators generate a push and pull framework in the decision-making process that balances the costs and benefits of use.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".