Mobile healthcare applications and gamification for sustained health maintenance

Abstract

This paper examines how gamification affects user intention to use mobile healthcare applications (mHealth) and how the effect of gamification works differently according to health status, age, and gender. We use data from a mobile survey conducted by a Korean representative survey agency. We estimate the effect of gamification on user intention to use mobile healthcare applications based on a structural equation model and examine the moderating effects of self-reported health status, age, and gender. We find that gamification is effective in increasing user intention to use mHealth, especially in the healthy and younger groups. These findings suggest that mHealth, with the gamification factor, would encourage healthy (but lack exercise) people as well as unhealthy people to maintain their health status, and thus the mHealth developers need to consider the gamification factor when they develop mHealth services for healthy people.