Beyond adoption: integrating TTAT and user-centric design for mHealth service continuance

A significant challenge for healthcare organizations is user retention, with high early app abandonment rates impacting long-term engagement. The study evaluates how organizations can sustain mobile health (mHealth) applications by addressing perceived technological threats and leveraging user-centric design strategies.

The study employs a cross-sectional survey design and collects data from 377 young adult mHealth users across metropolitan cities in India. An integrated SEM-ANN approach was employed to investigate how threat avoidance motivation, perceived mHealth knowledge and perceived ease of use shape continuance intentions toward mHealth applications, using technology threat avoidance theory. It further examines the moderating role of gamification and personalization in mitigating perceived threats and fostering attitudes toward mHealth applications.

The findings indicate that perceived ease of use was the most crucial factor in defining attitudes, and self-efficacy emerged as a precursor for threat avoidance motivation with mHealth. While not directly influencing continuance intention, gamified elements strengthened the effects of positive attitudes and threat avoidance motivation. Interestingly, the ANN output confirms personalization as critical for continuance intention. These findings underscore the importance of combining user psychological insights with organization design-centric strategies.

The study contributes to the limited literature on the mHealth postadoption phase of sustained engagement with novel integration of behavioral insights and user-centric design. These insights provide strategies for healthcare organizations and mHealth service providers seeking to design more engaging, secure and sustainable digital health platforms.