Does Privacy Threat Matter in Mobile Health Service? From Health Belief Model Perspective

A lot of mobile health (mHealth) service apps have been launched in the market with advances in technology. When people decide to use these mHealth service apps, they have to provide their personal data or personal health data more or less to the service providers. However, the health data is more sensitive data than general personal data. In addition, the behaviour of using mHealth service apps includes technology use behaviour and health promotion behaviour. Therefore, we employed HBM to be the theory foundation to find out what factors will impact on the intention to upload personal health data via a mHealth service app. Online questionnaires were distributed and 133 valid questionnaires were returned. The results showed the perceived benefits is the only factor to influence an individual intention to upload personal health data. The specific information privacy concerns has no significant effect on the behaviour intention. That means people value the benefits that the mhealth service app can bring more than the threat of privacy they perceived. The construct, disposition to value privacy (DTVP), have strong effects on perceived vulnerability, perceived severity, and specific information privacy concerns. Future studies will be recommended.