Growing Trends in Adoption of mHealth Apps and Users’ Perception of Availing Healthcare Services: A Study in Mumbai City

Abstract

The advent of smart healthcare has facilitated the ease of providing convenient health services to people. mHealth apps are not much different from it. This paper aimed at understanding the growing trends among users to adopt mHealth apps for availing healthcare services. It studies the users’ preference and perception toward mHealth apps provided free of cost by government and private companies on the Google Play Store.

In this study, mHealth apps offered by government and private companies were selected from the Google Play Store on the basis of their ratings and installs to study the trends in adoption. The survey-based questionnaire was used through purposive sampling to collect data from users in order to study their perception of mHealth apps.

The study revealed that the demographic variable education has an association with users’ perception of mHealth apps. The study also witnessed that more awareness about mHealth apps resulted in more adoption of them with a correlation of 0.688 for mHealth apps offered by the government and 0.905 for mHealth apps offered by private companies.

There has been a considerable increase in mHealth app users specifically during COVID-19 where still the level of awareness among people is low. Even though healthcare apps are heightened to meet the growing needs of users, their adoption is still quite low, especially apps offered by private companies. There is a need to bring awareness among people so as to penetrate mHealth apps in the market and inducing its more adoption among people.