Acceptability and Adoption of mHealth Interventions for Medication Adherence

Introduction

As previously described in Chapter 3, the IM approach is a health behavior framework that prescribes a specific set of steps in the development of interventions, such as mHealth apps. The success of an app ultimately depends on the acceptance and usage by its target audience (Alkhaldi et al., 2016; Car, Tan, Huang, Sloot, & Franklin, 2017; Venkatesh, Thong, & Xu, 2016), such as patients for medication adherence apps. Therefore, in line with Step 5 of the IM approach (Chapter 3, Figure 4), developers should seek to gain an in-depth understanding of the factors that can influence patient acceptance of their mHealth app for adherence (Bartholomew, Parcel, Kok, Gottlieb, & Fernandez, 2011; Car, et al., 2017). It has been suggested that end users’ acceptance of a technology-based health intervention can be studied through evaluation of their behavioral intention to use the intervention, which is a reliable predictor of actual use (Holden & Karsh, 2010). Although there is a paucity of information on the acceptability of medication adherence apps for chronic conditions, studies for other aspects of healthcare in various disease conditions suggest that apps generally have favorable acceptance among patients and healthcare professionals (Azevedo, Bernardes, Fonseca, & Lima, 2015; Berkowitz, Zullig, Koontz, & Smith, 2017; de Vries et al., 2018; K. A. Kessel, Vogel, Schmidt-Graf, & Combs, 2016; Kerstin Anne Kessel et al., 2017). These studies show that different socio-demographic characteristics, such as younger age and male gender (Azevedo, et al., 2015; Crilly et al., 2019; Kerstin Anne Kessel, et al., 2017), and prior use of mobile technologies (e.g. SMS or apps) (Azevedo, et al., 2015; de Vries, et al., 2018) can significantly influence patients’ and healthcare professionals’ interests in using or recommending the use of mHealth apps.