Breaking the Data Value-Privacy Paradox in Mobile Mental Health Systems Through User-Centered Privacy Protection: A Web-Based Survey Study

Abstract

Background Mobile mental health systems (MMHS) have been increasingly developed and deployed in support of monitoring, management, and intervention with regard to patients with mental disorders. However, many of these systems rely on patient data collected by smartphones or other wearable devices to infer patients’ mental status, which raises privacy concerns. Such a value-privacy paradox poses significant challenges to patients’ adoption and use of MMHS; yet, there has been limited understanding of it. Objective To address the significant literature gap, this research aims to investigate both the antecedents of patients’ privacy concerns and the effects of privacy concerns on their continuous usage intention with regard to MMHS. Methods Using a web-based survey, this research collected data from 170 participants with MMHS experience recruited from online mental health communities and a university community. The data analyses used both repeated analysis of variance and partial least squares regression. Results The results showed that data type (P=.003), data stage (P<.001), privacy victimization experience (P=.01), and privacy awareness (P=.08) have positive effects on privacy concerns. Specifically, users report higher privacy concerns for social interaction data (P=.007) and self-reported data (P=.001) than for biometrics data; privacy concerns are higher for data transmission (P=.01) and data sharing (P<.001) than for data collection. Our results also reveal that privacy concerns have an effect on attitude toward privacy protection (P=.001), which in turn affects continuous usage intention with regard to MMHS. Conclusions This study contributes to the literature by deepening our understanding of the data value-privacy paradox in MMHS research. The findings offer practical guidelines for breaking the paradox through the design of user-centered and privacy-preserving MMHS.

Patients and Stakeholders’ Perspectives Regarding the Privacy, Security, and Confidentiality of Data Collected via Mobile Health Apps in Saudi Arabia: Protocol for a Mixed Method Study

“…Indeed, an effective approach to address users’ concerns regarding data security is to ensure that they can easily navigate the technology and access its security features. These anticipated findings align with reports from previous studies that have identified various approaches to enhance the adoption and uptake of mHealth apps [ 32 , 33 ].…”

Evaluating Users’ Experiences of a Child Multimodal Wearable Device: Mixed Methods Approach

“…With respect to privacy, audio recordings provide high-fidelity information regarding participants' lives and require special considerations related to participant privacy, data confidentiality, and recording bystanders (for review, refer to the study by Cychosz et al [13]). Our approach to protecting participant privacy aligns with user-centered privacy protections recommended for mobile health research [36] and a "rights-based" approach adopted increasingly in the United States and used by the European Union (ie, General Data Protection Regulation), according to which individuals have the right to control their personal data, including but not limited to consent, erasure, secure data management practices, and transparency. For example, an important strategy to minimize privacy risks includes giving participants control over recordings [37,38].…”