02326nas a2200157 4500008004100000245009900041210006900140260000900209300001400218490000700232520173700239653002301976100001501999700001902014856013502033 2020 eng d00aImproving Mobile Health Apps Usage: A Quantitative Study on mPower Data of Parkinson's Disease0 aImproving Mobile Health Apps Usage A Quantitative Study on mPowe c2020 a399–4200 v343 aPurpose
The emergence of mobile health (mHealth) products has created a capability of monitoring and managing the health of patients with chronic diseases. These mHealth technologies would not be beneficial unless they are adopted and used by their target users. This study identifies key factors affecting the usage of mHealth apps based on user usage data collected from an mHealth app.

Design/methodology/approach
Using a data set collected from an mHealth app named mPower, developed for patients with Parkinson’s disease (PD), this paper investigated the effects of disease diagnosis, disease progression, and mHealth app difficulty level on app usage, while controlling for user information. App usage is measured by five different activity counts of the app.

Findings
The results across five measures of mHealth app usage vary slightly. On average, previous professional diagnosis and high user performance scores encourage user participation and engagement, while disease progression hinders app usage.

Research limitations/implications
The findings potentially provide insights into better design and promotion of mHealth products and improve the capability of health management of patients with chronic diseases.

Originality/value
Studies on the mHealth app usage are critical but sparse because large-scale and reliable mHealth app usage data are limited. Unlike earlier works based solely on survey data, this research used a large user usage data collected from an mHealth app to study key factors affecting app usage. The methods presented in this study can serve as a pioneering work for the design and promotion of mHealth technologies.10aBusiness Analytics1 aLi, Jiexun1 aChang, Xiaohui uhttps://stage.business.oregonstate.edu/biblio/improving-mobile-health-apps-usage-quantitative-study-mpower-data-parkinsons-disease