Ability first or opportunity first in the m-health era? A hybrid SEM-ANN approach
| Date | 12 September 2023 |
| Pages | 86-112 |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/AJIM-11-2022-0497 |
| Published date | 12 September 2023 |
| Author | Ping Li |
Ability first or opportunity first
in the m-health era? A hybrid
SEM-ANN approach
Ping Li
Beijing Institute of Technology, Beijing, China
Abstract
Purpose –The purpose of this study is to propose and test a model to explain users’intention to adopt
m-health devices and divide the importance of antecedents for users to adopt m-health devices based on the
stimulus-organism-response (S-O-R) framework.
Design/methodology/approach –This research conducted an online survey with m-health app users and
collected 562 valid responses. A hybrid SEM-ANN approach was employed to evaluate the research model and
hypotheses.
Findings –The results show that motivation (M), opportunity (O), and ability (A) affect users’flow experience
and loyalty and further affect their adoption intention of m-health technology. Opportunity plays a more
critical role in m-health adoption intention than ability.
Originality/value –This study comprehensively examined the factors that affect users’deep engagement
and m-health adoption from the perspectiveof MOA. It used the hybrid SEM-ANN method to divide the critical
role of motivation, opportunity and ability, providing a new analysis approach for studying information
technology (IT) behavior.
Keywords S-O-R framework, m-health, MOA theory, Flow experience, Loyalty, Adoption intention
Paper type Research paper
1. Introduction
Health has gradually become a hot topic of widespread public attention, with the
improvement of human health awareness nowadays. Many people suffer from chronic
diseases or are in sub-health due to increased workload and unbalanced diet. However,
traditional offline medical services challenge patients’diverse health management needs due
to the high economic and time costs of people going to hospitals for diagnosis and health
monitoring (Wu et al., 2021). Mobile health management devices are designed to help cope
with this challenge.
Mobile health devices bring many conveniences to people, allowing them to better and
more comprehensively grasp their health status and promptly detect their physical problems.
Many IT companies are committed to developing user-oriented intelligent mobile health
devices, such as smartwatches and various mobile applications for health management. They
can record data related to user health (such as steps) and biological characteristics (such as
body temperature, body fat, blood pressure, heart rate and blood sugar levels) and urge them
to exercise to avoid health threats and reduce the frequency of hospital visits (Cechetti et al.,
2019). Users can track themselves and develop healthier habits through the records on these
mobile health devices.
Not all consumers are willing to use it continuously to manage health, although m-health
brings many benefits. Some consumers expressed their doubts about m-health devices,
possibly due to privacy concerns, especially for those suffering from diseases (Gorini et al.,
2018). In addition, consumers’technological preferences and personal health status may have
AJIM
77,1
86
The author would like to thank all the anonymous referees for commenting on earlier versions to
improve this paper.
The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available on Emerald Insight at:
https://www.emerald.com/insight/2050-3806.htm
Received 18 November 2022
Revised 7 March 2023
26 June 2023
Accepted 8 August 2023
Aslib Journal of Information
Management
Vol. 77 No. 1, 2025
pp. 86-112
© Emerald Publishing Limited
2050-3806
DOI 10.1108/AJIM-11-2022-0497
different intentions toward using m-health. Some users have interruption behavior after
experiencing unpleasant user experiences (Serlachius et al., 2019). Therefore, it needs to be
clarified about the motivation and behavior of people to continue using m-health devices.
In addition, encouraging and guiding users to use m-health apps is still an urgent matter.
The existing research discusses the m-health behavior of users based on different theories
and perspectives. Some studies explored the influencing factors of users’adoption of
m-health devices based on the technology acceptance model (Cho, 2016), while other
researchers described the mechanism for users to adopt m-health technology based on UTAT
and UTAUT2 frameworks (Dwivedi et al., 2016;Alam et al., 2020a,2021). However, the main
factors in these models (perceived ease of use and perceived usefulness) did not accurately
reflect users’motivation to use m-health devices. Some scholars have considered why people
use electronic health devices based on the theory of planned behavior (M^
asse et al., 2014), but
just from the perspective of user-perceived health, ignoring the impact of IT itself on users.
Thus, it is necessary to comprehensively examine the adoption of m-health by integrating
technology, behavior, psychology and other factors. Understanding these factors helps us
know users’motivation in participating in fitness tasks. In addition, most existing studies
consider many factors that affect user adoption but do not emphasize the critical factors.
Based on these research gaps, the primary purpose of this study is to explore the
antecedents that affect users’adoption of m-health devices from a theoretical perspective and
solve the following problems:
(1)How do motivation, opportunity and ability affect user attitudes and m-health devices
adoption behavior, respectively?
(2)Which is more critical about motivation, opportunity and ability when users adopt
mobile health devices?
Compared with the existing research, this study not only considers the personal factors of
users but also checks the impact of the technical factors of the app on users’adoption.
By comprehensively considering factors such as motivation, opportunity and ability, we
understand the motivation of users to adopt m-health and provide insights into m-health
adoption behavior. In addition, integrating flow experience and loyalty into the model as
intermediate variables helps us understand users’specific psychological experience process.
It provides new sights for expanding the MOA theory. Finally, this study helps m-health
service providers identify the importance of platform technical features when users adopt
apps and provide a theoretical basis and practical suggestions for improving platform
services and enhancing users’willingness to use.
2. Literature review
2.1 m-Health adoption
The popularity of mobile technology provides convenience for users to manage their health.
The concept of “mobile medicine”was first introduced by Istepanian et al. (2007),whichis
defined as a medical system that uses mobile communication and network equipment to
provide medical services. More and more mobile devices appear in people’s lives with the
developmentof technology. These include wearabledevices, m-health apps and others.People
use thesedevices to monitor their essentialphysical conditionand manage their weight (Reeder
and David, 2016). Moreover, with the continuous upgradingof m-health devices, some mobile
devices even allowdoctors to communicate with patientsby voice or video.
The existing research on m-health technology has contributed to relevant fields from two
perspectives. On the one hand, some scholars focus on the prerequisites for m-health
adoption, which are based on the TAM (Davis, 1989), Technology planned behavior (TPB)
The m-health
era
87
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