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Background Mobile health (mHealth) care apps are a promising technology to monitor and control health individually and cost-effectively with a technology that is widely used, affordable, and ubiquitous in many people’s lives. Download statistics show that lifestyle apps are widely used by young and healthy users to improve fitness, nutrition, and more. While this is an important aspect for the prevention of future chronic diseases, the burdened health care systems worldwide may directly profit from the use of therapy apps by those patients already in need of medical treatment and monitoring. Objective We aimed to compare the factors influencing the acceptance of lifestyle and therapy apps to better understand what drives and hinders the use of mHealth apps. Methods We applied the established unified theory of acceptance and use of technology 2 (UTAUT2) technology acceptance model to evaluate mHealth apps via an online questionnaire with 707 German participants. Moreover, trust and privacy concerns were added to the model and, in a between-subject study design, the influence of these predictors on behavioral intention to use apps was compared between lifestyle and therapy apps. Results The results show that the model only weakly predicted the intention to use mHealth apps (R2=0.019). Only hedonic motivation was a significant predictor of behavioral intentions regarding both app types, as determined by path coefficients of the model (lifestyle: 0.196, P=.004; therapy: 0.344, P<.001). Habit influenced the behavioral intention to use lifestyle apps (0.272, P<.001), while social influence (0.185, P<.001) and trust (0.273, P<.001) predicted the intention to use therapy apps. A further exploratory correlation analysis of the relationship between user factors on behavioral intention was calculated. Health app familiarity showed the strongest correlation to the intention to use (r=0.469, P<.001), stressing the importance of experience. Also, age (r=–0.15, P=.004), gender (r=–0.075, P=.048), education level (r=0.088, P=.02), app familiarity (r=0.142, P=.007), digital health literacy (r=0.215, P<.001), privacy disposition (r=–0.194, P>.001), and the propensity to trust apps (r=0.191, P>.001) correlated weakly with behavioral intention to use mHealth apps. Conclusions The results indicate that, rather than by utilitarian factors like usefulness, mHealth app acceptance is influenced by emotional factors like hedonic motivation and partly by habit, social influence, and trust. Overall, the findings give evidence that for the health care context, new and extended acceptance models need to be developed with an integration of user diversity, especially individuals’ prior experience with apps and mHealth.

Privacy-preserving data markets are one approach to restore users' online privacy and informational self-determination and to build reliable data markets for companies and research. We empirically analyze internet users' preferences for privacy in data sharing, combining qualitative and quantitative empirical methods. Study I aimed at uncovering users' mental models of privacy and preferences for data sharing. Study II quantified and confirmed motives, barriers, and conditions for privacy in data markets. Finally, in a conjoint study, trade-offs between decisive attributes that shape the decision to share data are analyzed. Additionally, differences between user groups with high and with low privacy concerns are observed. The results show that the anonymization level has the greatest impact on the willingness to share data, followed by the type of data. Users with higher privacy concerns are less willing to share data in data markets and want more privacy protection. The results contribute to an understanding of how privacy-preserving data markets could be designed to suit users' preferences.

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