Mobile Health Fitness Applications: A Quantitative Analysis of Features and Barriers to Routine Use and Data Sharing Acceptability (Preprint)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND Mobile health (mHealth) fitness applications are increasingly being used for research and physical activity promotion; however, which features facilitate and impede routine engagement, a known predictor of application retention, are not well understood. OBJECTIVE To understand facilitators and barriers in the use of mobile applications relating to physical activity promotion. METHODS We distributed a pan-Canadian online questionnaire via the behavioral research platform Prolific.co to evaluate what features associated with the use and routine engagement (i.e., daily, or weekly use) of mHealth fitness applications, and attitudes about data sharing. Binary logistic regression was used to quantify the association between these endpoints and exploratory factors such as the perceived utility of various mHealth application features. RESULTS The survey received 694 responses. Most people were women (62%), the median age was 28 (range: 18–78), and most people reported current use of an mHealth fitness application (48%). The perceived importance of personal health (OR 2.40; 95%·CI 1.34–4.50) was the factor most associated with the current use of an mHealth fitness application. The feature most associated with routine engagement was the ability to track progress toward a goal (OR 5.10, 95%·CI 2.73–9.61) while the most significant barrier was the absence of goal customization features (OR 0.44, 95%·CI 0.25–0.81). The acceptance of sharing health data for research was high (56%) and privacy concerns did not significantly affect routine engagement (OR 0.81, 95%·CI 0.40–1.77). Results were consistent across race and gender. CONCLUSIONS Our results demonstrate that mHealth applications have the potential to be scaled across populations. Optimizing applications to improve self-monitoring and personalization could increase routine engagement and thus user retention and intervention effectiveness.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.013 | 0.049 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.001 |
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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".