Techno-spiritual Engagement: Mechanisms for Improving Uptake of mHealth Apps Designed for Church Members

Hye Sun Yun, Shuo Zhou, Timothy Bickmore

Abstract:

Keeping users engaged with mHealth applications is important but difficult to achieve. We describe the development of a
smartphone-based application designed to promote health and wellness in church communities, along with mechanisms
explicitly designed to maintain engagement. We evaluated religiously tailored techno-spiritual engagement mechanisms,
including a prayer posting wall, pastor announcements, an embodied conversational agent for dialogue-based scriptural
reflections and health coaching, and tailored push notifications. We conducted a four-week pilot study with 25 participants
from two churches, measuring high levels of participant acceptance and satisfaction with all features of the application.
Engagement with the app was higher for users considered to be more religious and correlated with the number of notifications
received. Our findings demonstrate that our tailored mechanisms can increase engagement with an mHealth app.