Leveraging mobile fitness apps for healthier lifestyles: How affordances drive sustained engagement.

Background: The widespread use of mobile fitness apps (MFAs) provided new opportunities to promote regular physical activity and adopt a healthy lifestyle. However, many MFAs have encountered underutilization issues and declining in user stickiness. Promoting the continued use of MFAs is an urgent goal. Objective: This study examined how MFAs' affordances (tracking, visualizing, reminding, gaming, and sharing) influence users' continuance intention from a health empowerment perspective. Methods: This cross-sectional study surveyed 279 users using MFAs and analyzed the data using structural equation modeling. Results: The results showed that tracking, visualizing, gaming, and sharing affordances positively impact health empowerment, while reminding affordance had no impact. Health empowerment can positively impact users' continuance intention. Furthermore, health empowerment mediated the relationships between the MFA's affordances and continuance intention. Conclusion: This study examines the differential effect of MFA's affordances on users' continuance intention, specifically identifying the affordances that are impactful in driving sustained engagement. Furthermore, this study establishes health empowerment as a fundamental mediating mechanism through which these affordances exert their positive influence on continuance intention. These findings significantly advance the understanding of the nuanced relationship between technology affordance and user behavior in the MFA context. The results provide targeted and actionable design recommendations for mobile fitness app developers to enhance user long-term engagement.