Promoting Health-Related Abilities and Behaviors via Health Apps: A Self-Regulation Perspective

Motivated by the gap between the use of health technologies and actual health-related outcomes, this study builds on self-regulation theory to construct a research model that aims to unveil how technological intervention of health app overall quality affects self-regulated abilities and behaviors about health app use, health information literacy, and physical activity, which together determine health-related outcomes pertaining to health status and satisfaction with life. Responding to the lack of exploration of the interaction among different apps, narcissistic theory is applied to explain how the usage of selfie apps reinforce the effects of health apps. To empirically test our proposed research model, we plan to administer a large-scale survey questionnaire on health app usage.

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