Relationship between the use of a smoking cessation mobile health application and emotional attitudes

We designed this study to elucidate the relationship between emotional attitudes of people who smoke and their use of a smoking cessation mobile health application (app), by exploring unobserved heterogeneity in the data. In an importance-performance map analysis performed with 3 groups of university students who smoked cigarettes segmented according to unobserved heterogeneity embedded in the survey sample dataset, we found that anxiety was a relatively important factor. However, its performance was low in relation to app users’ smoking cessation intention. This indicates that developers of smoking cessation mobile health apps need to reconsider the emotional attitudes of people who smoke, toward the apps. Limitations and directions for future research are discussed.