A Consumer Behavior Perspective of Adopting Mobile Contact Tracing Apps in a Public Health Crisis: Lessons from ABTraceTogether for COVID-19 Pandemic

Responses to the COVID-19 pandemic included m-Health innovations, such as contact tracing and exposure notification applications to track virus exposure. Such apps were released by over 45 international governments throughout 2020, becoming the first m-Health innovation with such widescale deployment. Most regions relied on voluntary adoption, and many failed to receive a critical mass of users. Some of these apps can track and share user’s locations, social contacts, and health information, which sparked concerns and misperceptions about the privacy and security of user data. It is important to understand consumer behavior and adoption challenges based on people’s perceptions of benefits, barriers, and risks. To investigate this, we sent an online questionnaire to over 600 participants with open-ended questions asking about their experience with one such app, ABTraceTogether. This chapter covers qualitative findings regarding device and application-level issues participants identified as barriers to their adoption and continued usage of the app, which are accessibility, battery life, downloading challenges, device memory, network connectivity and costs, operating system compatibility, performance issues, and usability. Insight on consumer behavior gained from this study can guide m-Health design and promotion to aid future health crises and personal wellbeing