Effects of emotional attachment on mobile health-monitoring service usage: An affect transfer perspective

Mobile health-monitoring services (MMSs) empower patients with chronic illnesses to self-manage their health concerns; however, in practice, many patients become inactive users after employing MMSs for a short time. The reasons for this usage pattern remain unclear. By extending the literature that focuses on the cognitive reasoning behind system usage, our study takes an affect transfer perspective to examine how these patients develop emotional attachment to MMSs that subsequently drives their usage. Drawing on affect transfer theory, we hypothesize that patients’ satisfaction with MMS components influences their emotional attachment to the service through both cognitive and misattribution routines, and that the combined effects of these two routines are contingent on patients’ health rationality. Our hypotheses are tested with survey data collected from 228 patients with chronic illnesses. This study contributes to the mobile health (mHealth) literature by investigating patients’ actual behavior based on their interactions with MMSs from an affect transfer perspective. It also informs service providers of MMSs regarding how to motivate service usage by patients with chronic illnesses by adopting a strategic design.