2020/08/29 by Bakheet Aljedaani, Aakash Ahmad, Aljedaani, Bakheet +5
Health Professions · Psychology · Social Sciences · #Digital Mental Health Interventions #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Mobile Health and mHealth Applications #Privacy, Security, and Data Protection #Software Engineering (cs.SE)
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2008.13009
openalex publication_date 2020/08/29 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Mobile systems offer portable and interactive computing, empowering users, to\nexploit a multitude of context-sensitive services, including mobile healthcare.\nMobile health applications (i.e., mHealth apps) are revolutionizing the\nhealthcare sector by enabling stakeholders to produce and consume healthcare\nservices. A widespread adoption of mHealth technologies and rapid increase in\nmHealth apps entail a critical challenge, i.e., lack of security awareness by\nend-users regarding health-critical data. This paper presents an empirical\nstudy aimed at exploring the security awareness of end-users of mHealth apps.\nWe collaborated with two mHealth providers in Saudi Arabia to gather data from\n101 end-users. The results reveal that despite having the required knowledge,\nend-users lack appropriate behaviour , i.e., reluctance or lack of\nunderstanding to adopt security practices, compromising health-critical data\nwith social, legal, and financial consequences. The results emphasize that\nmHealth providers should ensure security training of end-users (e.g., threat\nanalysis workshops), promote best practices to enforce security (e.g.,\nmulti-step authentication), and adopt suitable mHealth apps (e.g., trade-offs\nfor security vs usability). The study provides empirical evidence and a set of\nguidelines about security awareness of mHealth apps.\n