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The purpose of this study is to examine individuals' decisions to use health and fitness apps by applying the extended technology readiness and acceptance model (TRAM), which combines technology readiness (TR), the technology acceptance model (TAM) and perceived enjoyment (PEN). Moreover, this study explores the differences between users and non-users regarding their intentions to use health and fitness apps.

Data collection (n = 206) was conducted using convenience sampling from four large universities in South Korea. The data were analysed by partial least squares structural equation modelling (PLS-SEM) using SmartPLS 3.0.

The results revealed that positive TR positively affects perceived ease of use (PEOU), perceived usefulness (PU) and PEN, while negative TR had a negative impact only on PEN. Furthermore, the significant relationships between PEOU, PU and PEN were identified. In addition, multigroup analyses indicated that the relationships between positive TR and PEN, between PEN and PEOU, between PEOU and PU, and between PU and behavioural intention were positively stronger for app users.

This study initially applied the TRAM to understand individuals' behavioural intentions to use health and fitness apps. Moreover, this study identified the distinct roles of positive and negative TR affecting individuals' cognition regarding using health and fitness apps. The differences in the psychological processes between app users and non-users offer insights and implications for practitioners.

This study aimed to explore consumers' continuance intention to use a fitness and health app by applying two theoretical models: the expectation–confirmation model (ECM) and the investment model (IM).

An online survey was administered to consumers who are currently using fitness and health apps (N = 342). Structural equation modeling (SEM) was conducted using Amos 22.0 software to examine the hypothesized relationships in the research model.

Results revealed that users' continuance intention was significantly predicted by the two models. Within the ECM, the positive and significant relationships among variables were found. Moreover, users' satisfaction and investment size had positive impacts on their commitment, which, in turn, positively affected the intention. Also, confirmation of expectations had a positive impact on investment size.

The integrated model helps better understand fitness and health app users' decision-making process from the perspective of relationship commitment and suggests practical implications for health and fitness app providers.

This study replicates and extends the unified theory of acceptance and use of technology (UTAUT2) to explain the drivers of future use intention of fitness apps among users. It extends existing theory by investigating continuance usage and adding health consciousness as a driver; an extension, which has implications for future studies on emerging technologies in the health care sector and beyond.

Building on the UTAUT2, the author built a path model of future app-use intention. A survey involving 591 respondents from the United Kingdom was conducted, and the data was analyzed using partial least squares structural equation modeling.

The results of this study confirm that five drivers explain future use intention, namely habit, perceived playfulness, health consciousness, perceived performance and price value. These findings have implications for sports marketing theory and practice, as well as for policymakers, in that health consciousness is important for fitness app adoption, which in turn has repercussions for entire health care systems.

This study makes two main contributions. It extends technology acceptance theory by using a sample of users to explain future use intention of fitness apps and adds the construct health consciousness as a nontechnological element of the continuance usage of fitness apps to the model. The result is a path model that confirms the importance of personal health consciousness and potential generalizability to future health industry technologies with further implications for sports marketing management theory and practice.

This research created a theoretical framework based on theory of consumption values (TCV) and theory of perceived risk (TPR) to investigate the determinant factors behind consumers' intention to use health and fitness apps during the COVID-19-related lockdown. In addition, based on selectivity hypothesis theory (SHT), this study also explored how gender differences moderate the relationships between the determinants and consumers' behavioral intention.

A total of 613 respondents completed a self-reported online questionnaire. Structural equation modeling was conducted to test the role of potential determinants in influencing consumers' behavioral intention. Hierarchical multiple regression was performed to examine the moderating effect of gender.

The findings of this research revealed that physical appearance, general health, enjoyment, affiliation and condition have positive influences on consumers' behavioral intention, while privacy risk and security risk exert negative impact on consumers' behavioral intention. More importantly, the moderating results indicated that only affiliation, privacy risk and security risk have stronger influences on female, while other predictors showed the same effects on both genders.

Fitness providers should embrace health and fitness apps as a new contactless tool to offer services during and after the COVID-19-related lockdown. Fitness providers and app developers need to focus more on the utility and quality of their health and fitness apps. In addition, they should add more gamification elements to health and fitness apps because these elements could increase consumers' hedonic experience especially during the lockdown. Third, the security systems in health and fitness apps should be continuously updated to decline privacy risk during and after the COVID-19-related lockdown. Lastly, when female consumers are targeted during the lockdown, fitness providers should make more efforts to imbue health and fitness apps with more social features and improve the level of security.

Although the importance of contactless technologies has been highlighted ever since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, there has been very little research on the usage of health and fitness apps during the lockdown based on TCV and TPR. Meanwhile, the moderating role of gender differences in this context remains underexplored. This research is one of the early attempts to fill in these gaps. The findings of this study will enhance the theoretical framework regarding the acceptance and use of health and fitness apps; it also challenges the generalizability of SHT in the context of the COVID-19-related lockdown. Moreover, several important implications for the health and fitness industry during and after the COVID-19 pandemic were suggested.

The purpose of this paper is to extend the technology readiness and acceptance model (TRAM) to consider an individual’s health consciousness (HC), thereby improving the capability of the model to predict an individual’s attitude toward and intention to download and use dietary and fitness apps.

A total of 994 participants completed a self-reported online questionnaire. Structural equation modeling and χ² difference testing were conducted to compare the predictive capability of the proposed health consciousness TRAM (HC-TRAM) and the TRAM. The comparison of the proposed HC-TRAM in terms of potential and actual users of dietary and fitness apps was also discussed.

The results obtained from the HC-TRAM and the TRAM indicate that in addition to technology readiness, HC exerts a positive effect on the perceived ease of use and usefulness of dietary and fitness apps. χ² difference test results indicated that the predictive capability of the proposed HC-TRAM is higher than that of the TRAM.

The drivers and inhibitors of a person’s readiness to embrace modern information technology play roles when predicting his or her intention to download and use dietary and fitness apps. HC should be promoted by encouraging people to eat right and regularly perform appropriate exercise to prevent obesity and overweight, thereby maintaining a healthy lifestyle.

This study incorporated individual cognitive factors and HC into the TRAM to fill the literature gap and deepen and broaden existing theoretical frameworks of the TRAM in the public health sector.

In this article we aim to understand how the network formed by fitness tracking devices and associated apps as a subset of the broader health-related Internet of things is capable of spreading information.

The authors used a combination of a content analysis, network analysis, community detection and simulation. A sample of 922 health-related apps (including manufacturers' apps and developers) were collected through snowball sampling after an initial content analysis from a Google search for fitness tracking devices.

The network of fitness apps is disassortative with high-degree nodes connecting to low-degree nodes, follow a power-law degree distribution and present with low community structure. Information spreads faster through the network than an artificial small-world network and fastest when nodes with high degree centrality are the seeds.

This capability to spread information holds implications for both intended and unintended data sharing.

The analysis confirms and supports evidence of widespread mobility of data between fitness and health apps that were initially reported in earlier work and in addition provides evidence for the dynamic diffusion capability of the network based on its structure. The structure of the network enables the duality of the purpose of data sharing.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the determinants of user adoption of smartphone fitness apps in context of an emerging economy.

The present study uses the extended unified theory of acceptance and use of technology (UTAUT2) as the base model along with two additional constructs, i.e. self-efficacy and personal innovativeness. The data collection was done through an online survey, wherein a total of 324 valid responses were obtained for the statistical analysis. All the hypothesized relationships were tested through partial least square structural equation modelling (PLS-SEM) using an open source programming language and software environment, i.e. R Software along with plspm-package.

Significant predictors of smartphone fitness app adoption intention include effort expectancy, social influence, perceived value, habit and personal innovativeness. Further, this study confirms significant relationship between personal innovativeness and habit, self-efficacy and effort expectancy and effort expectancy and performance expectation. This study reveals that personal innovativeness is the strongest predictor of behavioural intention. Contrary to the expectations, factors like performance expectancy, facilitating conditions and hedonic motivation did not influence behavioural intention.

This study gives significant clues to app developers that can drastically influence the adoption of fitness apps. The findings suggest that marketers should focus on users with high personal innovativeness that can further act as role models and significantly influence their social circle. Interestingly, the findings suggest that fitness apps, as compared to other apps, should not emphasize much on the hedonic value of their offerings.

This study is one of the few studies to examine the adoption of smartphone fitness apps in an emerging economy context by using extended version of UTAUT2 model. Further, this study shows how new endogenous and exogenous variables (i.e. self-efficacy and personal innovativeness) contribute to better explanatory power of the UTAUT2 framework.

Despite fitness applications (apps) are increasingly downloaded by smartphone users in recent years, the usage behavior after initial adoption often lasts for a short period of time for most users. The purpose of this paper is to explore factors affecting stickiness of fitness app and then indicate how to retain existing users.

A research model was developed based on stimulus–organism–response (S-O-R) model. Using the data collected from 231 fitness app users through an online survey, the established model was empirically assessed by structural equation modeling (SEM).

The results show that human-to-information interaction and human-to-human interaction as environmental stimuli affect individuals' internal state, including social comparison and perception of fitness self-management, which consequently influence the stickiness of fitness apps.

The study provides new insights into the mechanism regarding why users are willing to continuously use fitness apps. Moreover, the understanding of social comparison among users in such process was also deepened.

Consumers often start using mobile health apps but quit using them after a brief period of time. However, app providers can only ensure their long-term existence in the market if their app is used a long period, so that they can thus generate long-term revenue from advertising, subscriptions and sponsorships. Therefore, this study aims to gain a deeper understanding of the determinants of consumers’ continuous usage intention.

Based on a sample of 274 current mobile health app users, this study tests whether ideal self-congruence and/or functional congruence strengthens consumers’ continuous usage intention.

The results reveal that ideal self-congruence and functional congruence positively affect consumers’ continuous usage intention. Furthermore, an initial favorable attitude toward a mobile health app (i.e. ideal self-congruence) leads to a more favorable evaluation of the functional attributes of the app regardless of consumers’ objective evaluation of these attributes.

Providers should specifically take consumers’ ideal self-concept into consideration to increase consumers’ continuous usage intention of mobile health apps. Matching consumers’ ideal self-concept further leads consumers to a more favorable evaluation of the functional attributes of mobile health apps.

Only a few studies have examined factors influencing the continuous usage intention of mobile health apps; moreover, these studies have largely neglected the symbolic dimension of consumption behavior. Therefore, this study introduces congruence theory into the context of mobile health apps to provide a holistic view of the influence of the symbolic (i.e. ideal self-congruence) and utilitarian (i.e. functional congruence) dimensions on mobile health app consumption.

This study aims to identify the variables that could influence the intentions to use fitness apps based on the attractiveness of the fitness apps.

The technology acceptance model (TAM) was used in this study. For this purpose, an online questionnaire was sent to 200 sports consumers of a fitness center (117 women and 83 males) to find out their perceptions regarding attractiveness, usefulness, ease of use, enjoyment, trust and intention to use of the fitness app of the fitness center. Exploratory factor analysis, confirmatory factor analysis and structural equation modeling were conducted.

The results showed that the variables analyzed have a positive influence on the intention to use fitness apps, with the attractiveness and usefulness and the ease to use and intention to use having the strongest relationship.

These findings show the importance of these variables for the use of fitness apps in fitness centers. Furthermore, the findings represent advancement and help in the design and development of apps in fitness centers, as well as in the field of sports management.